Data tracking and website hits are buzzwords that have been bandied about in the digital age for years
now. But what are website analytics exactly?

At their most basic, website analytics tell you who visited your website, how long they spent clicking
around on your page, and what — if anything — they did while they were checking out your online home.
Sound like useful statistics to know? Of course; but figuring out how to measure these users and their
behavior can be trickier.

There are five important web analytic measurements to know. The first is visits. “Visits” refers to the total
number of times your website has been clicked onto, but it does not indicate if the same user has come to
your website multiple times or if you have had multiple visitors. For example, you could have 100 visits in
one day, but only 10 users who visited your website 10 times each. Another key measurement is unique
visitors, which indicates the number of individual users who visited your website over a certain period.

Yet another useful analytic is page views. This is how many pages are viewed on your website. For
example, a person who only visited your main page would have only one page view, but an individual
visitor who visited 10 of your pages would have 10 page views. The average length of time a person
spends on your website and new versus returning visitors are two more common measurements.

You also might want to consider how visitors find your website so you can design your website in the best
way possible. Some of the ways visitors find websites include through direct navigation, by typing in the
link, through referral traffic from social media and email promotions, or through an organic search on a
search engine like Google.

After you’ve decided what you want to measure, you also want to figure out your goals in your website
analytics.

The first step in setting up website analytics is creating goals for your website, and then measuring key
performance indicators (KPIs) to see if you’ve achieved those goals. These objectives can be simple or
complex. For example, you could make your goal to educate your readers about the uses of a product.
Your KPI for that goal, then, would be to monitor visitors’ clickthrough rates focusing on keywords related
to that product.

Bottom line: web analytics are extremely useful for maintaining and improving your web presence, but they are also complicated. The SiteSTR team can help with creating web analytics that work for you — and can optimize your web presence in a way that helps you find and match all your key KPIs. Remember, designing a killer website is hard, but we can help.