Special Topics - Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics - page 210

we won't be able to do justice to the topic in just one section of one chapter
in this topic. What we'll try to do is introduce you to some of the things you
can learn from live website data and specifically some of the implications they
might have for the usability of your site.

9.1.1 Basic Web Analytics
Some websites get huge numbers of visitors every day. But regardless of how
many visitors your site gets (assuming it gets some), you can learn from what
they're doing on the site.

A number of tools are available for capturing web analytics. Most web-host-
ing services provide basic analytics as part of the hosting service, and other web

SOME WEB ANALYTICS TERMS

Here are the meanings of some of the terms used commonly in web analytics.

• Visitors. The people who have visited your website. Usually a visitor is counted

only once during the time period of a report. Some analytics packages use the term
“unique visitor” to indicate that they're not counting the same person more than
once. Some also report “new visitors” to distinguish them from ones who have
been to your site before.

• Visits. The individual times that your website was accessed; sometimes also called

“sessions.” An individual visitor can have multiple visits to your site during the time
period of the report.

• Page views. The number of times individual pages on your site are viewed. If a

visitor reloads a page, that typically counts as a new page view; likewise, if visitors
navigate to another page in your site and then return to a page, that will count
as a new page view. Page views let you see which pages on your site are the most
popular.

• Landing page or entrance page. The first page that a visitor visits on your site. This

is often the home page, but might be a lower level page if they found it through a
search engine or had bookmarked it.

• Exit page. The last page that a visitor visits on your site.

• Bounce rate. The percentage of visits in which the visitor views only one page on

your site and then leaves the site. This could indicate a lack of engagement with
your site, but it could also mean that they found what they were looking for from
that one page.

• Exit rate (for a page). The percentage of visitors who leave your site from a given

page. Exit rate , which is a metric at an individual page level, is often confused with
bounce rate , which is an overall metric for a site.

• Conversion rate. The percentage of visitors to a site who convert from being simply

a casual visitor to taking some action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a
newsletter, or opening an account.