Special Topics - Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics - page 211

analytics services are available for free. Perhaps the most popular free analyt-
ics service is Google Analytics ( http://www.google.com/analytics/ ). Figure 9.1
shows a screenshot from Google Analytics.
Figure 9.1 Sample Google Analytics screen for the MeasuringUX.com site.
As can be seen in Figure 9.1 , you can look at many of the metrics for your site
over time, such as line graphs for visits, average visit duration, and page views.
These graphs of visits and page views show a pattern that's typical for some
websites, which is a difference in the number of visitors, visits, and page views
for the weekend vs the weekdays. You also can capture some basic information
about the visitors to your site, such as the operating system they're running, their
screen resolution, and the browsers they're using, as illustrated in the pie charts.
Simply looking at the number of page views for various pages in your site can
be enlightening, especially over time or across iterations of the site. For exam-
ple, assume that a page about Product A on your site was averaging 100 page
views per day for a given month. Then you modified the homepage for your site,
including the description of the link to Product A's page. Over the next month,
the Product A page then averaged 150 page views per day. It would certainly
appear that the changes to the homepage significantly increased the number
of visitors accessing the Product A page. But you need to be careful that other
factors didn't cause the increase. For example, in the financial-services world,