Website Analytics – Basics to Build On for Digital Marketers

by Andrew Schulkind

If you’re not using Analytics on your website, chances are your excuse is that it’s too daunting to wade into all that data. (It can’t be because of cost – Google Analytics is free and it’s sufficient for most small businesses.)

Analytics doesn’t have to be daunting, though. There are a few simple metrics worth paying attention to as you get comfortable with the firehose of data that any good analytics package will try to drench you with.

Ignore all the other information as you get started, focus on these few metrics, and you’ll soon have a framework from which you can branch out into more sophisticated – and more useful – analytics data points.

Page Visits
This is perhaps the most basic of all website statistics: how many people visited my site this week/month/year? Page visits provide you a sense of how well you are getting the word out about the content on your site. In that regard, it’s a bit of a proxy metric for things like email marketing, social media, pay-per-click advertising and other efforts you might be using to drive traffic to your site.

It can also point to the value of the content you’re creating if you’re seeing increases in traffic that might be attributable to others sharing your content and promoting it on their own sites. (Getting into tracking results at that level is a bit more involved. Give us a call if you’re interested in learning more about how to do so.)

One important note: it’s no accident that I mentioned week, month, and year above rather than day. As useful as these basic metrics are on their own, their much more powerful if you use them to view results over time rather than snapshots in time. Are your page visits numbers growing? Do they spike regularly on certain days of the week? At certain times of the year? All can be helpful in determining what parts of your message are most effective.

Pages per Visit
Once you have a sense of how many people are visiting your site, you may want to take a look at how much of your site they’re looking at. Again, this is a metric that will be more useful when viewed in context rather than in isolation.

First bit of context is time. 2.58 pages per visit might be great or not so great. If you typically average 10 pages per visit – or 1 page …

Second, you might want to bring in a related metric: time per visit.

As you gain more comfort with these two basic measures you can begin to think about factors like

Traffic Acquisition
Behavior Flow
Engagement
Conversion Goals
Technical Factors

These will give you a much more complete picture of the health and effectiveness of your website, but at the cost of greater complexity. If that’s intimidating to you, start with the basics and you’ll be able to tackle the broader questions more quickly than you might expect.

(photo by OC Always)

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Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
__utma	0	2 years	This cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmb	0	30 minutes	The cookie is set by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmc	0		The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is deleted when the user closes the browser. The cookie is not used by ga.js. The cookie is used to enable interoperability with urchin.js which is an older version of Google analytics and used in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine new sessions/visits.
__utmt	0	10 minutes	The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to throttle the request rate.
__utmz	0	6 months	This cookie is set by Google analytics and is used to store the traffic source or campaign through which the visitor reached your site.
YSC	1		This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos.

Cookie	Duration	Description
__atuvc	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
__atuvs	30 minutes	This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
na_id	1 year	This cookie is set by Addthis.com to enable sharing of links on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
ouid	1 year	The cookie is set by Addthis which enables the content of the website to be shared across different networking and social sharing websites.
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vc	1 year	This cookie is set by addthis.com on sites that allow sharing on social media.

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
_ga	0	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, camapign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookies store information anonymously and assigns a randoly generated number to identify unique visitors.
_gid	0	1 day	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to store information of how visitors use a website and helps in creating an analytics report of how the wbsite is doing. The data collected including the number visitors, the source where they have come from, and the pages viisted in an anonymous form.
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Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
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IDE	1	2 years	Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
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NID	1	6 months	This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users.
uid	0	1 year	This cookie is used to measure the number and behavior of the visitors to the website anonymously. The data includes the number of visits, average duration of the visit on the website, pages visited, etc. for the purpose of better understanding user preferences for targeted advertisments.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	1	5 months	This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.

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