So what are Unique Visitors?
These are the visitors that are coming to your page for the first time, the way google analytic measures this is by collecting the sessions users IP address when they land on the page.
When a unique visitor then clicks onto one of your other pages of your site that page view will recorded as a visit and not another unique visitor viewing the page for the first time.
So a A unique visitor can visit as many other pages on your site, but can only be a unique visitor once.
Having a consistent amount of unique visitors lets you know that you are getting a lot of first time visits, meaning you site has good visibility and must be ranking well in the search engine.
How do I track my visitors?
Well you can do this for free by simply creating a google account and then register you web page on the google analytics site.
Once you put in your website details you will be given a small snippet of code that you can include on your site, this will link your account with google analytics and allow you to get back data relating to visitors that land on your page.
Whats Google Analytics?
Google Analytics allows you to track people that visit your site by adding session cookies to the computer when they land on your page. This not only allows you to track your page hits, but also visitors behaviour
Cookies will hold information about what pages you jumped to, what links you clicked on and what page you exited from, this and a vast amount more.
For other websites, such as amazon, cookies can hold a whole host of information, including what interactions you have, what you are buying, or what offers to display to returning customers based on previous sale data.
This is all information that can be used by websites to improve the user experience.
Why Web Analytics is Important?
Analytics is essential for any websites growth because it give insight into the failing of a site and highlights areas in which to improve.
With the data about bounce rate, page views and exit rate alone you could target and diagnose most of your sites problems.
I have but touched on a few of the metrics available with in google analytics, for the full gamut of tool available and a better incite into implementing tracking for your site, I suggest visiting the google analytics official site to find out more.
Now that’s all fine and dandy, but I have created a site, installed the code tracking snippet and people are coming to visit, but looking at my google analytics people are leaving just as quickly as they come in, why?
Trouble is having lots of visitors is great, but if you have a high bounce rate or exit rate your content probably isn’t up to scratch.
Bounce rate is how many people come to your web site and then click off after only viewing a single page, this could be for a few different reasons:
- Content isn’t engaging or interesting enough
- The site is too confusing or overwhelming e.g too overloaded with pictures or ads
- Difficulty finding content or links to related content
- Your site doesn’t relate to the keywords or key phrases you have targeted
Many people may be too focused on getting traffic through keywords and trying to please the search engines, rather than trying to write content to please or engage its users.
A good rule of thumb is to always look at your page views, this will tell you how many pages a visitor has looked at when they have viewed you site, if this is high then you probably have something that they like.
If a visitor didn’t like your site or didn’t find your content engaging they will probably click off straight away and the page views for this visitor will be one.
Most people will have heard of the term “hits” in regard to web page visits, but using this as a guide to see how many people visit your site is actually wrong.
When a computer sends a request to a server to display a page in the browser each element that is loaded in will be considered a hit by google analytic terms.
So if you have a page with four images and a main text field, this will be regarded as five hits not one, when that visitor then clicks on to one of your other pages that has a further four images and a text field, this will end up registering as another five hits.
So in total you have ten hits accumulated by just one visitor over two pages, this is why you shouldn’t measure your site by how many hits its gets and go by how many unique visitor it gets instead.
How to Increase website engagement
Google have for along time now been wise to people trying to usurp the search engines by just creating web pages full of keywords and affiliate ads.
Because most sites like these are just filled with keywords its generally pretty unreadable and hard to understand them, people just wont stick around to read material like this, they will look else where.
It also very easy for google to find these kinds of sites and will just simple send them into the void where no one will ever see them again.
Googles mantra is to give value, then think about marketing later, this means that your priority is the content to your users, everything else being secondary.
So always write good rich content and if you want to rank better make your content long, try to hit two to three thousand words per page this will greatly effect your ranking ability over time.
So we have established it is important to produce great sticky content that will provide value to our visitors.
We need to understand the questions our visitors are asking us, using keywords or key phrases that they may already be searching for, and respond by answering these questions in an efficient and engaging way.
It is important that we have a good amount of unique visit, but also a good rate of returning traffics to the site.
Returning visitors means we have good content and by having lots of unique visitors means that we have good presence, whether it is in the search engines or through links from our social media sites.