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Starting Web Analytics
By Kostis Panayotakis

Web analytics involves analysis of visitor behavior, in order to evaluate and improve the web channel, as well as gain customer insight. Since I started blogging, I have been reviewing my host s weblog based analytics info and monitoring trends in traffic, most visited pages, traffic sources (referrer URLs), keywords which produce traffic (the q parameter in search engine organic traffic) and other stuff. Moreover I learned to focus on useful information (keywords, sessions, pageviews etc) while ignoring the useless (hits, files, Kbytes sent).

I have recently followed the advice of Avinash Kaushik (a major thought leader on the subject of web analytics) and installed Google analytics (hereafter GA) on my web pages. Actually, it is a very easy process copying and pasting a javascript piece at the end of the html code of each page. GA is a free page-tagging analytics solution, an approach which is considered by many as superior to web log based ones. It allows to isolate visits by search engine bots or web spam software. GA offers some very interesting reports.

Some basic reports involve :

• Visits &amp Pageviews absolute values &amp trends over time
• Visitors vs new visitors: you can assess the level of repeat visitors on your site
• Highly visited pages
• Bounces (visits that involved a single page view) and exit rates per page
• Average length of stay on each page and distribution .
• Depth of visit: number of pageviews per visit.
• Traffic Segments by source (referrer reports): direct, search engine, affiliate. Segmentation is a powerful technique

The value potential of web analytics, even with the use of a free tool, has not been identified by many webmasters and businesses.

Additional analysis on web analytics and screenshots can be found at http://www.pleroforea.com/starting_web_analytics.htm

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