Melius Weideman
web-visibility.co.za
web-usability.co.za
Search Engines & Metrics
Please note that this presentation will also serve
as class notes. Some slides will therefore contain
more text and detail than traditional PPT
slideshows.
COPYRIGHT: Melius Weideman 2014 b-WebVisSE-7-Content
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67.6
19.2
9.8
96.6%
June 2014
Search Engines – Who’s who
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Search Engines – Manual Comparison 1
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Search Engines – Automatic Combination
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Can you interpret the potential effect of
new developments?
Search Engines – Can you?
Can you compare the major Search Engines?
Can you view SERPs as your user sees them?
Melius Weideman
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http://youtu.be/gdnrtCGhmDk
Weideman, 03:15
Website Analytics
Search Engines – Metrics /
Analytics - Basics
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•Hit - A request for a file from the web server. The number of hits received by a
website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely
misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity.
•Page View - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis,
ie 1 page view will be logged per html file downloaded.
•Visit / Session - A series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a
set timeout. A visit is expected to contain multiple hits (in log analysis) and page views.
•First Visit/First Session - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous
visits.
•Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User - The uniquely identified client generating
requests on the web server within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month).
•Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period
between the last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.
Search Engines – Metrics / Analytics
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•New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits. This definition
creates a certain amount of confusion and is sometimes substituted with analysis
of first visits.
•Impression - An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's
screen. Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.
•Singletons - The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. While not a
useful metric in and of itself the number of singletons is indicative of various forms of
"Click Fraud" as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to
identify automatons ("bots").
•Bounce Rate/% Exit - The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and
exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.
•Visibility time - The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.
Search Engines – Metrics
Melius Weideman
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The hotel problem is generally the first problem encountered by a user of web
analytics. The term was first coined by Evison explaining the problem at one of
the Emetrics Summits and has now gained popularity as a simple expression of
the problem and its resolution
The problem is that the unique visitors for each day in a month do not add up to
the same total as the unique visitors for that month. This appears to an
inexperienced user to be a problem in whatever analytics software they are using.
In fact it is a simple property of the metric definitions
The way to picture the situation is by imagining a hotel. The hotel has two rooms
(Room A and Room B) which are fully booked over a 3 day period
The Hotel Problem …
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Look at the columns: the hotel has two unique users each day over three days.
The sum of the totals with respect to the days is therefore six
Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Total
Room A John John Jane 2 Unique Clients
Room B Jean Jane Jean 2 Unique Clients
Total 2 2 2 ?
Look at the rows: however, during the period each room has had two unique users.
The sum of the totals with respect to the rooms is therefore four
Consider the centre six cells: in actual fact only three visitors have been in the
hotel over this period. The problem is that a person who stays in a room for two
nights will get counted twice if you count them once on each day, but is only
counted once if you are looking at the total for the period. Any software for web
analytics will sum these correctly for whatever time period, thus leading to the
problem when a user tries to compare the totals
The Hotel Problem …
Melius Weideman
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Explained in a different way: A single webpage typically consists of multiple discrete
files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of
hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages
on the website than the website's actual popularity (images, .js and .css files)
A hit is the retrieval of any item, like a page or a graphic, from a
Web server. For example, when a visitor calls up a Web page with
four graphics, that's five hits, one for the page and four for the
graphics. For this reason, hits often aren't a good indication of
Web traffic
It’s a real minefield for website analytic terms out there. Some
site received16 million hits in a week. So what?
Metric 1: Webpage HITS
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A page containing 1000 images will register 1001 hits when
viewed by a single visitor. The same visitor may reload the
same page 10 times to register 10,010 hits instantly. That
doesn’t mean there are 10,010 people visiting your site
Using hits to gauge a site’s popularity is misleading and
there’s nothing to brag about when you get thousands of hits
per day. You might just as well talk about how much bandwidth
your site is consuming daily – more is NOT better in these
cases
Metric 1: Webpage HITS
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A pageview (PV) or page impression is a request to load a
single page of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web a page
request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on
another HTML page pointing to the page in question. This
should be contrasted with a hit, which refers to a request for a
file from a web server. There may therefore be many hits per
page view
A user visits a given website by entering at the homepage, and then
clicking on the menu to visit a subpage. Next he returns to the
homepage. That will be counted as one visit, but three PVs. The
browser “Back” button also generates extra PVs
Metric 2: Pageviews
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These PVs may be counted as part of web analytics. For the owner of
the site this information can be useful to see if any change in the page
(such as the information or the way it is presented) results in more
visits. If there are any advertisements on the page, the advertisers
would also be interested in the number of page views to determine
their expected revenue from the ads. For this reason it is a term that is
used widely for Internet based marketing and advertising
PVs can be used to gauge the ability of a website to retain the
visitor’s interest, sometimes called the stickiness of a website. A
high PV count per visitor means your visitors may be browsing
several pages during their visits. This can be a good thing to mention
if you are selling advertising on your site
Metric 2: Pageviews
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A Unique Visitor comes to the website once only within the
timescale
A Visitor is one person who visits a given website
So the only difference between the two is the length of the timescale. What is
accurate – 1 hour? 6 hours? 24 hrs? 7 days? 1 month? … Typically 30
minutes!
A visitor is identified by his or her IP address and sometimes
through cookies, which act like online fingerprints
One visitor can visit the same webpage more than once within
the same hour, or day, or whatever timescale you choose
Metric 3: Visitors
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16
Example Metrics
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Both free and paid tools allow you to track which keywords are
sending you traffic, are profitable, and which keywords lose
money. As soon as you start tracking results your campaigns get
more efficient because you start focusing on the results
Tracking where you already rank does not alert you to potential
areas of opportunity that you have not yet focused on, but if you
track conversions you know what those keywords are worth, and it
is easier to rank for keywords related to words you already rank
well for than it is to rank for a whole new basket of keywords.
Analytics Tools
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These tend to be limited in feature set and give themselves sitewide links
on your site, or require you to trust giving a major search engine like
Google with virtually all your marketing data.
Google Analytics - powerful full featured analytics tool. Even allows you to track
your ROI by keyword for each AdWords ad position. Google AdWords also has
internal split testing and conversion tracking software.
Google Website Optimizer - allows you to A/B split test landing pages and track
how well Google AdWords traffic converts.
Microsoft Project Gatineau - not publicly launched yet, but accepting invite
requests.
Site Meter - starts off as free, but charges for advanced features
Stat Counter - starts off as free, but charges for advanced features and
bandwith usage.
Webalizer - default log analyzer on many servers.
Analog - default log analyzer on many servers.
Awstats - another popular default log analyzer on many servers.
Free Analytics Tools
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Analytics Tools: GA code
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(function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type =(function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type =(function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type =(function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type =
'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' =='text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' =='text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' =='text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' ==
document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.googledocument.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.googledocument.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.googledocument.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google----
analytics.com/ga.js'; var s =analytics.com/ga.js'; var s =analytics.com/ga.js'; var s =analytics.com/ga.js'; var s =
document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();
Analytics Tools: GA code
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GA code
Find any webpage with GA code, and identify the code block…Find any webpage with GA code, and identify the code block…Find any webpage with GA code, and identify the code block…Find any webpage with GA code, and identify the code block…
Melius Weideman
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Analytics Tools: GA reporting 1
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Analytics Tools: GA reporting 2
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Analytics Tools: GA reporting 3
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Analytics Tools: GA reporting 4
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How does the one affect the other?
Search Engine Metrics – Can you?
Can you interpret each analytic measure?
Can you see patterns based on
day/season/events?
Melius Weideman
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Verndale Media, 04:21
How to use Google Analytics
Search Engines – Metrics /
Analytics - Basics
http://youtu.be/QUx4YRlebBI
Melius Weideman
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View some GA code
Open any familiar webpage, view the source code (right click, View
Source), search for ga. (Ctrl+F)
Takeaway Actions
If you do not find any ga., repeat with another webpage until found
Read the huomah webpage on SERP comparison
See the Grid