Goggle Analytics is a great free tool from Google that you can use to track your current site usage. It is much more detailed that most website tracking software that comes with standard hosting accounts. Below is a quick start guide to the information you can get from this report.
Visits – Here it will display the last 4 weeks of visits to your website. Here you will see if your website has any trends regarding when people are viewing your site by weekday.
Maybe most of your visits are on a Monday. Is this due to sports results being updated on a Monday or maybe you have visits only showing on weekdays. This would be normal for a company website. You can also see if by adding new information on different days of the week which day gets the largest increase in visits.
Site Usage – A useful summary of activity on your website.
Visits – Number of times your website has been viewed. (Please note that this does not separate multiple visits by a single person. What this means is a single user might account for 20 of your visits this month)
Pageviews – The number of pages that have been viewed in total
Pages/Visit – The average number of pageviews for each visit
Bounce Rate – Displays the percentage of people that left your website just after viewing one page. This should run anywhere from 10% to 80%. What bounce rate is good for your site varies on your business.
Average Time On Site – Exactly as the heading says.
% New Visits – Shows what percentage of visits in the time frame have never been toyour website before.
Visitors Overview – Displays the number of unique visitors to your website. So in my example I have had 345 visits and 243 visitors. What this means is that I had several people visit my site more than once.
Map Overlay – Shows where in the world my visits are coming from.
Traffics Sources Overview – This is extremely useful as it shows how people are getting to my site.
Referring Sites – Links from Other Websites
Search Engines – Google, Bing and the rest.
Direct Traffic – When people enter my address directly into the address bar of a browser.
Other – Google Analytics can’t tell
Content Overview – Displays the top visited pages of your website.
