Web analytics

The audience of a website (also known as Web analytics) quantifies the attendance of a site based on indicators such as number of unique visitors, page views, visits, average visit length etc. It combines measurement, collection, analysis and presentation of data from the Internet used to understand and optimize the use of the Web site.

Key indicators

Analysis of the audience of a particular website can be made in the context of search engines optimization (SEO). Against a background of online selling, audience measurement refers to the measurement of aspects of a website linked to the business strategy of the company, for example, what are the web pages that led to the largest number of online shopping?

In a context of business to business, in addition to the quantitative measurement, it is possible to have a qualitative measure of traffic through linking IP addresses with the corporate name of the companies and a view of “customer centrics” information. To differentiate the standard Web Analytics solutions they are called “Web Analytics B2B” solutions.

Audience measurement and attendance on the Internet fall into three main categories:

• site-centric measurement;
• user-centric measurement;
• customer-centrics measurement identified as corporate nName.

It is possible to measure the traffic in different ways:

• the volume of data;
• the number of unique visitors;
• the number of pages displayed.

With current tools, like Google Analytics or Analyzer III of AT Internet, it is possible to go further in the analysis of traffic, including:

• visitor origin;
• the conversion rate (ROI);
• time spent;
• bounce rate;
• the technology used on the client;
• the configuration used by the client;
• content.

Definitions and vocabulary

• Page views: Refers to the number of times a web page is displayed in a web browser for a given period (by default, it is called Page Views per Month). There is also rederred as impressions.
• Visits: A visit is defined as a set of web pages visited consecutively during a defined period of time. Also referred to as sessions.
• Visitor / Unique Visitor: A visitor is a visitor who:
  • consults a series of consecutive web pages (detected by tags)
  • performs a series of Web queries (recorded in the log)

  The uniqueness comes from the assignment of a unique identifier: session number (log) or cookie.

  The unique visitor is defined as unique visits based on a cookie. The concept of unique visitor is linked to time (one visitor a day, a week, a month …). There is much discussion on this concept since the “site-centric” tools measure “unique browsers” accurately and do not know to recognize the same person connected from work and from home, while “user centric” tools know to recognize the person but generally did not have enough data to make an accurate measurement.

• Average time per visit: the average time measured on a site visit. This average takes into account the visits of at least two page views in order to have time.
• Bounce rate: This metric is applied to a page. It shows the percentage of visitors who have seen, during their visits, only this page. Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which the person left your site from the homepage. A high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the type of site you have and how you want visitors interact with your site. If users find all the information on one page, bounce rate close to 100% is predictable but the visit was of quality.