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.