Web analysis is our way of checking the activity of users who visit us. It gives us information about what the activity of our visitors is. In this article I will talk about two free web analysis tools: Google Analytics and Statcounter.
Nowadays, in your business, company or at the level of participation it is very important to pay attention to what the variables say that we can analyze and inform us of relevant information about the behavior of the people who visit our website.
Web analytics with Google Analytics
The main tool we will use for our analysis will be Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool of Google and is designed so that we can obtain relevant data about the activity on our website and better understand the Internet users who visit it.
The configuration of Google Analytics starts by entering our Gmail email account. Once inside the account we can create several properties, each of which will point to a website that we manage. The way to confirm the ownership of a domain will be by embedding a code in the web page that allows the tracking of the information.
That code will allow:
- Confirm that you are an administrator of the website.
- It allows you to track the data that you will later be able to see in Google analytics.
Dashboard
When entering our Google Analytics page we will find a dashboard: a preconfigured main screen. In it are the data that are usually used most in web analysis, but we can edit it and add indicators that for our specific activity, we can also find interesting.
The main indicators of a website give us very relevant information. Among them we highlight:
- The first is the number of users in a given period. This means the number of times our pages have been viewed and can be very useful especially to compare with previous periods or to see which days of the week or at what time we receive more traffic.
- On the other hand, there is the number of sessions. This figure will help us a lot, as it does not refer to how many times our website has been visited. It is greater than the first value since the same user can log on multiple times during the study period. There is a ratio that is studied which is the number of pages per session. That is, you revisit the page.
- Another useful number is the duration of session on the website. It is the time that a visitor is on our website. If we make long articles it may be that the visitor is longer, but remember that sometimes a lot of text is not a good idea because a visitor can enter, read a paragraph and leave.
- Another important variable is the rebound percentage. The bounce rate or percentage is a term used and that measures when a navigator leaves the site after having seen a single web page, in a few seconds.
You can create multiple properties and add to multiple web pages to crawl. This page, avertigoland.com, has the main page which is this and then it has another web page (a subdomain) that is made in Joomla, which is a file from a past page. So I have two properties, one for each website.
Web analysis with Statcounter
Another very useful tool is Statcounter. I have used it since 2007 and it is complementary with Google Analytics. It has some very interesting metrics and help complete the puzzle of the people who visit your page. The main menu is the one you can see in the following figure.
In the same way it is necessary to add a tracking code so that your website is tracked.
Summary of statistics
The Statistics Summary page includes a trend chart to help track key metrics over time, while the following table shows totals and averages. Four key traffic metrics are reported on this page:
- Page views. Every time a visitor sees a page on your website it’s called a Page View.
- Sessions. When someone visits your website, browses one or more pages, and then leaves, this is called a session.
- Visitors. A visitor represents a unique person who visits your website during that day, week, or month. In short, a single visitor can have multiple sessions with multiple page views of each of those sessions.
Recent activity
Recent Activity pages, such as Visitor Activity and Visitor Routes, display detailed information about each visit in chronological order, as visitors navigate through a website. You can add visitor tags and alerts to an individual visitor to track them and receive an alert via email or the Statcounter mobile app when they revisit your site.
The reports dashboard provides a glance view of how a website is doing by displaying aggregated statistics for metrics such as location, duration of visit, traffic sources, popular pages, and more. You can also drill down into each statistic added and view the full report for further analysis.
Summary of web analysis
If you have a website, it is necessary that you perform a web analysis of the activity that visitors perform on it. Whether it’s a personal page, like a business page, you have to track the information in order to make decisions and improve statistics.
In this article we have reviewed two free tools that will allow you to check the most relevant data of your website. Data is collected that will allow you to improve your website and increase the number of visits. The study of that data is very important and relevant to be better positioned in google.
