Introduction to Web Analytics

You've got a stunning Web site, you're promoting it brilliantly, and yet, your conversion rate sits stubbornly at 3% or less. Or worse — you don't even know what your conversion rate is. Web analytics can help you find your conversion rate and the reason it's lower than you'd like it to be.

It's All About the Visitor

To engage in Web analytics is to piece together and observe the user experience as presented in data from your Web analytic software. It's about discovering who visited your Web site, what they did there, when and why they left. Armed with this information, you can create a better user experience, engage visitors and make it easy for them to convert.

How to Get Started

Web analytic software is easy to come by. You can get simplified versions for free online or included in some Web hosting accounts. More advanced applications are widely available for a price. Unless you have an unusually large or complex site, the free programs are probably enough to get you started.

Find Your Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of Web site visitors who completed the action you requested on a given Web page. It could be that they made a purchase, filled out a form or signed up for an email list. You already have one piece of the information you need — the number of people who converted. Your Web analytics software will give you the other piece, and this is where Web analytics gets fun.

What the Numbers Mean

Ideally, you would need the number of individual humans who visited the site in order to find the percentage of them who converted. But technical limitations prevent us from getting an accurate count of these individuals: one person may visit your site from two different computers, two people may visit your site from the same computer or a script may visit your site and count as a human. You will have to do your best to find the most meaningful measure of visitors.

To help you out, let's take a look at some of the numbers you'll find in your Web analytics program and what they mean.