Nihuo Newsletter

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. How to exclude invalid activities?
3. Which data should you focus on?
4. Unsubscribe

I. Introduction

The internet is a fast-paced environment. People can come to your website at any hour from a wide range of locations, each of them with different intentions or needs. Unlike physical retail stores, you can’t see who is coming in and browsing around. You don’t know much about the
people reading you.

You already get a glimpse of visitors everyday when they interact with your website. Some may register for an account, leave a comment or send
you an email. But many are ‘invisible’. They get to your site, see what you put out, click on a outbound link and disappear.

What you currently know about these individuals comes from a combination of visible user actions (e.g comments/emails) and statistics (e.g visit frequency/visit length). Is this knowledge sufficient for most businesses? Yes. But I think it would be tremendously helpful to learn even more about your visitors.

It is helpful to analyze and construct a general profile of your visitors, however shifting it may be, because it provides you with information that will allow you to better improve your content scope, site usability, conversation rate or marketing campaign.

II. How to exclude invalid activities?

Before analyzing visitor behavior, activities caused by spiders, bots and stolen object need be excluded to avoid noise.

To exclude invalid activities:

1. 1Right click profile and select Edit from menu
2. Select Hit Filter page
3. Click Template button and select Exclude all invalid activity
4. Click OK button
5. Clearing database is required ( Right click profile and select Clear database from menu)
6. Re-analyze ( Right click profile and select Analyze from menu)

III. Which data should you focus on?

Nihuo Web Log Analyzer provide a lot of information on how visitors are using your website, where they come from and what they are looking at. There are obviously a lot of different metrics to look at but I’m listing what I think is more relevant to understanding visitors in general: 1. Bounce Rate Understanding bounce rate is an important aspect of analyzing your overall statistics, especially when it comes to determining the effectiveness of an individual page. The bounce rate measures the number of visitors to a website that leave before a specified amount of time has elapsed (this time period varies among analytics tools, but typically it is 30 minutes). This means that if a user accesses your site and leaves it within 30 minutes or leaves their browser idle for that time, they will be registered as a bounce. The bounce rate for an individual page of a website is etermined by the number of users that access a page and leave the site without clicking to another page within the specified time period.

It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern. Generally a bounce rate less than 50% is considered
ok. This is based on our experience, but hopefully it gives you a feel for what you are shooting for.

One thing to keep in mind is that your expectation for meeting the standard on any given page of your site should also be measured against
the entrance sources for that page. Depending upon how a user is referred to your site, his or her understanding of the relevance of your
site’s content to their query will vary quite a bit.

To view the bounce rates for your website and the bound rate of each page on your site, go to the Bounce Rate report under Resources Accessed > Bounce Pages > Top Bounce Pages.

Below are other reports which are include bounce rate information.

• Bounce rate by visitor location -Visitor & Demographics > By Countries > Most Active CountriesVisitor & Demographics > By US States > Most Active US StatesVisitor & Demographics > By Cities > Most Active Cities
• Bounce rate by visitor ip classVisitor & Demographics > Top Class A IP > Top Class A IPVisitor & Demographics > Top Class B IP > Top Class B IPVisitor & Demographics > Top Class C IP > Top Class C IP
• Bounce rate by visitor referrerReferrers > Top Referring Sites > Top Referring SitesReferrers > Top Referring URLs > Top Referring URLs
• Bounce rate by search engineSearch Engines > Top Search Engines > Top Search EnginesSearch Engines > Top Search Phrases > Top Search Phrases

2. Visitor Location This allows you to make cultural and linguistic assumptions of your visitors. If you know you receive the most visitors from a few specific countries, you might want to create landing pages/offers or content with a geographic focus. If you geo-target your site, it makes your business look like it is there to serve the specific location of your visitor.

To view visitor location of your website, go to reports under Resources Accessed > Visitor & Demographics.

3. Search Phrase This includes both search engines and on-site search boxes. The clearest indicator of visitor interest, search terms tell you what they want to get from your site and it reveals information gaps you can fill up. This is where data collection gets specific. If you consistently get a lot of queries for a specific phrase, you can safely assume that there will be visitor interest in content or offers related to it. To view search phrases of your website, go to Top Search Phrases reports under Search Engines > Top Search Phrases > Top Search Phrases.

4. Traffic Source This includes search engines, referrer sites, type-in/bookmark traffic and ad campaigns. Pay attention to referrer sites: it reveals what visitors are reading or using. Traffic sources also tell you where to improve for greater visibility. It is not just about the amount of traffic but the quality of the traffic.

Let’s look at the ways you can determine the quality of traffic using your website analytics. Here are a couple of key metrics you need to pay
attention to:

• Visits
• Pages Per Visit
• Average Time on Site
• Bounce Rate

To view traffic sources of your website, go to reports under Referrers and Search Engines.

5. Visitor Path

Visitor Path is a process of determining a sequence of pages visited in a visitor session prior to some desired event, such as the visitor purchasing an item or requesting a newsletter. The precise order of pages visited may or may not be important and may or may not be specified. In practice, this analysis is done in aggregate, ranking the paths (sequences of pages) visited prior to the desired event, by descending frequency of use. The idea is to determine what features of the website encourage the desired result. “Fallout analysis,” a subset of path analysis, looks at “black holes” on the site, or paths that lead to a dead end most frequently, paths or features that confuse or lose potential customers. To view visitor path of your website, go to reports under Resources Accessed > Paths Through.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, you will find other ways to get more visitor data. When combined with other visitor statistics, it’s easy to understand your visitors, allowing you to better accommodate their needs or interest.