Short Glosary of Web Analytics

Hit 

A request to the web server for a file. This can be an HTML page, an image (jpeg, gif, png, etc.), a sound clip, a cgi script, and many other file types. An HTML page can account for several hits: the page itself, each image on the page, and any embedded sound or video clips. Therefore, the number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading.

Pageview

A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.

Unique Visitors

Unique Visitors represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Five Tips for Running Effective Web Ad Campaigns

You’ve bought advertisements on online media and your ad pulled in a significant number of clicks, but after looking at your Web Analytics you realize that your landing page has a bounce rate well over 60%.

That means that over 60% of the users coming to your site are briefly looking around and leaving, deciding immediately that this website isn’t what they are looking for.

One of the most effective ways to make your visitors stick around look at your products or services is to capture their attention with a targeted, well written ad. Research suggests that users decide to stay or leave your website site in 8 seconds or less — in that short amount of time, ad headlines are the only piece of copy that users will actually read.

Here are five tips for running successful web campaigns:

1. Put your web ad only on sites which publish targeted information.
Search on Google for keywords describing your product or service, research the sites which rank highly in top organic positions for the keywords that apply to your business, and try to place your ads on those web pages.

2. Send the visitor clicking on your ad directly to the product or service page of your website targeted for your ad, instead of sending him to your site’s home page.

3. Write your ad highlighting benefits instead of features; think about what problems you can solve for your visitor.

Instead of using a headline like:
Hilton Head Golf Packages
Try:
Five Ways to Save while Golfing in Hilton Head

4. Add to your website copy advice articles with advice related to your products and services and link them on your targeted landing pages. Visitors will appreciate any advice you care to give, and publishing these articles can put you in the situation of being perceived as an authority.

5. Measure Effectiveness.
You don’t have to make guesses about which ads are working for you. You can use web analytics to identify the right advertising for you business. If you don’t have this feature installed in your website, get it free from www.google.com/analytics.

White Hat vs. Black Hat

Search engine optimization methods are divided in two categories: black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Both methods can help you to get high rankings for your website on search engines. However, the black hat method is likely to get your website banned on search engines.

What is white hat SEO?
 
White hat SEO means that the webmaster doesn’t try to trick search engines. White hat SEO means playing by the rules. Web pages that are created with white-hat SEO methods are beneficial to web surfers, search engines and webmasters.
What is black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines. These methods include cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, etc.
Google and other search engines have made it clear that they penalize websites that use black hat SEO methods when they detect them.

You have probably  seen some web pages in the search results that looked strange or hardly related to what you’ve actually searched.  Some black-hat SEO methods can lead to these good results. There are quite a few webmasters who obtained high rankings for their web pages although they optimized them with methods that were not approved by Google and the other search engines.

The good news is that nearly all black-hat SEO methods have been detected by search engines sooner or later. Javascript redirects or doorway pages used to work in the past but nowadays, these methods are usually the ticket to the land of banned websites, and once a website is banned it’s very likely that it will carry this flag on it for the rest of its existence.

A website can get in trouble even if it used black-hat methods years ago

Things that cannot be detected by Google now might be detected by Google tomorrow. And Google might also be able to find out what you did in the past.

So be aware of those so called SEO specialists which promisses you Top 10 rankings in Google,Yahoo,MSN… in less than a month, some might use black hat SEO methods which will eventualy bann your website to appear in the search engines for ever.

Windows is a virus

If you type the word VIRUS in the search box on Apple dot com, the result is very funny.
Apple illustrating a good sense of humor, shows a little smiley with the result WINDOWS, recommending its TV ads.
Try for yourself.

No kids for Google!

Google’s terms of service, while ignored by the vast majority of users, contain a pretty shocking clause: Under 18’s are not permitted to use any of Google’s Web properties. That’s right, kids–no search, YouTube, Gmail, news, or images.

Google’s terms of service, thick with legalese, state that:

“You may not use … Google’s products, software, services and web sites … and may not accept the Terms if … you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google.”

Google’s name comes from… googol

Googol is the large number ten at its hundreth power, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta.

Online Sales Expected to Grow 17 Pct In 2008

Despite the bum economy, Internet retail sales will rise 16.6 % in 2008 to $204 billion, about the same rate of growth as in 2007, according to the latest annual study by Forrester Research. That’s way above the 3.5% growth in overall retail sales predicted for 2008 by the National Retail Federation. The biggest online categories: apparel (due to rise by $3.9 billion, or 17%), computers (up $3.2 billion, or 15%) and autos (up $2.5 billion, or 15%).

Of course, “e-tailing,” despite becoming more and more prevalent over the last few years, still accounts for less than 5% of the overall retail market in the U.S. The relatively small dollar base all but assures double-digit annual growth.

Hitwise Give Google 67% of US Searches in March 2008

Google Inc. received 67% of all U.S. Internet searches during the four weeks ended March 29, according to information service Hitwise.

Google received 64% of all U.S. Internet searches in the same period a year earlier.

 

Yahoo Inc.’s search engine received 20% of U.S. Web searches in the more recent period, while Microsoft Corp.’s MSN Search drew 7% and Ask.com 4%.

 

The remaining 46 search engines in Hitwise’s search engine analysis tool accounted for about 2% of searches in the U.S.