Site Analytics Terms Definitions

webcurious said 2 years, 8 months ago:

Can’t seem to find a few specific definitions of some terms and reporting processes.

1. Under visitor information what is the difference between “recent visitors” and “all visitors”? There are more “all visitors” listed for the statistic period than “recent visitors” but I can’t seem to find a pattern of difference or definition.

2. Under “Visitor Paths” I always only see two links. Other stats indicate some visitors are navigating through more pages than that. Why doesn’t “Visitor Paths” show the entire path of a visitor?

3. Under “Exit Links” there is a page column and an exit column. I am assuming the Exit column is where a visitor left the site from but I don’t understand clearly what the Page column represents.
What does the Page column show?

I have checked Help and Forum but can’t find these specific definitions.

RoniY said 2 years, 8 months ago:

@webcurious,

Great questions!

1. Recent Visitors vs. All Visitors: The main difference between Recent Visitors and All Visitors are “bounced” guests to your website. Someone who “bounces” on your website just lands on a page of your site and then departs with no further navigation. All Visitors will include these bounced guests, but Recent Visitors will only include those who further navigate on your website. The date rage for both reported figures will be specified by the date range you select for the report.

2. Visitor Paths: This is the linked path a visitor took during a single session on the website. If you have links to other sites (or separately hosted sub-domains) on your site that visitors may go to, this may interrupt their “session,” so if/when they return to your site they are viewed as a new/returning guest. This is one possibility of what you were seeing in your report. Otherwise, you may want to review the navigation for the site to see how your pages are linked. If you see a traffic pattern for visitors you don’t like (perhaps guests are not visiting pages you would like them to see), you may need to alter the navigation to force them to visit those other pages first before they get to the usual destination, or you may want to feature the navigation to those other pages more prominently.

3. Exit Links: The Page column shows the “page” the visitor was on when they decided to leave your website, and the Link column shows the link they clicked on to leave.

I hope this helps!
~Roni

webcurious said 2 years, 8 months ago:

Okay, though the counts between the bounce stats and the difference between the number of recent visitors and current visitors doesn’t match up by a count of 3 I do see that “all visitors” includes visitors that only show 1 page visited.

Definitely not an intuitive set of labels for these stats.

I’m not as confident with the “visitor paths” but can’t find a way to test or qualify it. My “recent visitors” list shows some visitors viewing up to 9 pages during their visit. It’s hard to image that they or any multiple page visitor left the site after each page. Navigation is flat with every page being accessible from every page. If they view 8 pages during their visit I would expect some stats in “visitor paths” to reflect this.

I have excluded myself from the stat list so I can’t test. I’ll get someone else to go in and navigate through a number of pages.

Thank you for the information. I’ll post again after I do this test.

webcurious said 2 years, 8 months ago:

Okay, I found the answer to my last uncertainties about “Visitor Paths”.

I was looking at that page and trying some things to see if I could extract better information out of it.

On impulse I clicked on one of the paths listed in the “Path” column and surprise……it opened up to a full list of the pages that particular visitor had navigated through, in order, as they visited my site.

There was no indication or instruction that this was how it worked. Nothing was highlighted or underlined or in any way looking like an invitation to “click here for more details”.

Kind of disappointed in this but at least I found it and now can get the information I need.

I think this thread is complete now.

Thanks much,

webcurious

Website Author: High Country Explorations, [url=http://highcountryexplorations.com]High Country Explorations[/url], [url=] High Country Explorations[/url]

chrisg said 2 years, 8 months ago:

@webcurious,

I’m happy to hear that you were able to information you need from within Site Analytics. I do apologize for any confusion that was caused from the experience.

Just so we can make an effort to try an improve upon our documentation regarding the use of Site Analytics and the definition terms, I will forward the information from this thread to our developers for review.

We’d also appreciate any additional feedback you would like to give to them directly. If you would like to submit some suggestions to help us improve our customers’ experience with Site Analytics, please email suggestions@godaddy.com.

Christopher G.

Dannye W said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Is there a guide or tutorial that explains what each of the reports actually means – not in general terms, but in specifics? It’s hard to make the figures between reports jive. I’m not sure how useful it is to me unless I can find a clearer explanation of the categories in the reports.

Dannye W said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Hope this isn’t a repeat, but it seems my last post didn’t show up.

Is there a guide that explains each category that has data attached in the individual reports in Site Analytics? I can’t seem to make some numbers jive with each other that seem like they should.

Unless I know what each of the sets of data actually means, I’m not sure that the data is doing me any good.

chrisg said 2 years, 5 months ago:

@Dannye W,

Currently, the only documentation we could provide in regards to the Site Analytics definitions can be found at the following URL address:

http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/1580

I hope this is able to assist you further.

Christopher G.

Dannye W said 2 years, 5 months ago:

Thanks, Chris. Still a bit confused though. For example: Can you explain to me how you can have 3018 referrals and only 612 visitors in a week? These are the kinds of connections that the definitions don’t make clear-at least to me.

chrisg said 2 years, 5 months ago:

@Dannye W,

The definitions explained through the previous help article I referenced actually does explain ‘referrals’ in the Analytic Data. Referrals are the number of times a given site referred traffic to the URL being tracked with Site Analytics.

This means that your site was referred by another site 3018 times. This doesn’t necessarily mean that visitors had clicked on the links referred to, as reflected by your total visitors of 612 for the week.

Christopher G.

BuddyBeep said 2 years, 5 months ago:

I am sure I am in the wrong group. I am a novice, I want to know simple things. Is their a facebook group that posts q & a ?
Thanks Bud

tuftytoes said 2 years, 3 months ago:

What is the difference between a “visitor” and a “unique visitor?” I can’t seem to find the definition anywhere.

sd3 said 2 years, 3 months ago:

Hi Tuftytoes – this article might help you understand the difference between visitors and unique visitors: http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/1580

Here’s a link to all of the help articles for Site Analytics: http://support.godaddy.com/help/category/233

Hope this helps!