My favorite part of Google Analytics is looking at what they can tell me about my site visitors. (If you're unsure what constitutes a "visit" in GA, refer back to this post here first.) Each time you load a web page in your browser by visiting that site, the logs track a tremendous amount of information about you. For instance, the  IP address of your computer isn't likely to change while you're surfing the web, and Google looks to see all the pages you visit in one session. That information is then analyzed to display a total number of visits (sessions), as well as the number of unique visits - new visitors vs. repeat visitors. They also identify the average number of pages viewed per visit, and the average amount of time spent on a website.

Some useful statistics for your webmaster are covered in the Technical Profile. This part covers browsers and operating systems used, screen resolutions, Flash versions, even connection speeds of your visitors. This helps your webmaster decide what settings are optimal for your visitors. For instance, aside from 4 visits from an iPhone this past month, I know that 99.4% of my visitors were using monitors that could view pages a minimum of 1024 pixels wide, confirming my choice of designing this site to use a width of 1000 pixels. The connection speeds are important for sites with multimedia, to ensure that your visitors can quickly access your audio and video and even interactive/Flash files. You might think your 10 minute video is of vital importance, but if the majority of your visitors are still on dial-up, chances are they're getting frustrated waiting for your video to load and are leaving your site.

My absolute favorite part of the Visitor analysis is the Map Overlay, a geographic map identifying where your site visitors are located.  This usually confirms what you expect, for instance my school's site visitors are mostly (85%) from the immediate area. But we also had visitors from 39 other states, the two with the most are neighboring states. So we can conjecture those are families who may be moving to the area and are looking for a good school for their children. I had a number of Canadians look at my business site this past month, and I'm working on a project with some Canadian team members. Their locations correlate to some of my Canadian site visitors. This is where it gets fun, making reasonable guesses as to who is actually looking at your website.

So you're looking at the past month's worth of data, seeing a graph of how many pages were viewed each day. What does it all mean? There are lots of interesting facts you can learn from your data which will help you improve your marketing plan.

Look for weekly patterns. Perhaps the majority of your visits happen Monday - Friday, but you don't get many pages viewed on the weekends. This tells you your visitors are looking during the weekdays, probably while at work (but we'll verify this later). Do most of your visits happen on a Monday? If you send out a weekly or monthly email/newsletter, be sure you send it on Monday when your customers are thinking about you, instead of on the weekend when they're away from email, as your newsletter will get buried in all the messages they receive over the weekend.

Want to know more about when they're looking? You can easily create a custom report in Google Analytics to show what time most people are looking at your site. On the left, click "Custom Reports" (you may not be able to do this if someone else set up your website reporting, just ask your webmaster to do this for you.) In the Metrics block on the left, look under Site Usage and drag Pageviews over to the first dotted metric box. In the Dimensions block under Visitors, drag Hour Of The Day to the first dotted dimension block, and Create Report. Now based on the timeline selected (a month by default, but you could select just one day if you wanted to look at a particular day), you can now see which hours of the day your site receives the most traffic. Google uses a 24 hour clock, 08:00 is 8am, while 23:00 is 11pm. Are your visitors looking at your site during working hours, or when they're at home? What does this likely mean about who your visitors are and what they're looking for?

Look at spikes in your daily pages viewed. Can you correlate an event to a particular spike? Maybe your newsletter or a brief email went out on a certain day. Softer spikes over several days may correlate to a mailing. Did you make a big announcement on a particular day? Do you receive more visits leading up to an event at your facility? Filter your data to show only for a particular day/date range of one of your spikes, then look at the top pages viewed for that timeframe. Are they the same top pages as you see each month, or were they looking at something in particular? Look at the search phrases for that time as well - were your visitors looking for something in particular, and does that correlate with the pages viewed the most?

Look at monthly trends. You can set GA to show you everything from the past year, and view it by month instead of day. Some months will have more pages viewed than other months - does this correlate to sales? If you promote outdoor activities, your winter months likely have less visitors, does the data reflect this? Why or why not?

Have you ever been using your computer, and become aware that things aren't quite right? Perhaps your web browser like Internet Explorer isn't working quite right, or perhaps it's your email. Maybe your computer starts freezing up or crashing and you're not sure why. Or worse, perhaps you now obviously have a virus; this could be manifested by male enhancement or pornographic ads appearing all over your computer (yes, it can happen). There's an easy solution.

From your start menu on Windows XP (hopefully it's a similar process on Vista and Windows 7), go to "Help and Support," then choose "Undo changes to your computer with System Restore." You can also get to this from the Start Menu >> Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> System Restore. Select "Restore my computer to an earlier time" and follow the directions from there out. I usually select a restore date about a week earlier if possible. Before running this you'll want to save any open work and close down all your open applications. Have patience while it restores and reboots, it takes several minutes.

Restoring your system will not affect any of your data (at least it's not supposed to, and never has for me). Your email, your pictures, music and movies you've downloaded, documents, presentations, etc. - that will all remain untouched. However if you have installed any applications since the restore date you selected, you will need to reinstall that software. This is a handy way to quickly recover your computer from virus attacks, or even periodically Windows updates that don't work as they're supposed to.

An oldie but goodie, actually one of the oldest and most well-known sites on the Internet. You can see a copy of the original site here: http://www.webhamster.com. Well, they say it's a copy, but the original didn't use QuickTime technology and this one does so it's not exactly the same, but it's the same furry critters and annoying song that will stick in your head for days.

Originally started as a challenge by her best friend to see who could get more visits to their sites, HamsterDance.com began in August 1998 by Deidre LeCarte. By January 1999, the hamsters achieved widespread fame on the Internet -who hasn't heard of the Hamster Dance? Well, who over the age of 30? They were eventually even featured on a tv commercial for Earthlink.

So what do you do with a site like this? If you're like most capitalists, you make money off it! The original hamsters have been redesigned into 3D characters and now sell their own DVD and music tracks, including a Christmas album. Their site also promotes the hamsters through a variety of free interactive features such as a "Meet & Greet" page, games, a newsletter, message boards and more. To learn more about the furry foursome, visit http://www.hampsterdance.com.

BACKUPS: If any of you have tried to log on to my website in the past 24 hours and noticed a bunch of gobbledy-gook on my site, you'll know that even well-managed sites can crash. In this case, it doesn't appear to be the work of malicious attackers or even a virus, it was just a corrupt database. Several tables were corrupted, much in the same way that random holes may appear in your clothes, or unidentified bruises on your legs. It's just one of those things that happens. Thankfully with technology, we can create automated scripts to make backups of databases and files on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It's not something you typically think about until you need it. As a professional, I've needed it enough that I set all my clients' sites and databases to backup frequently.

CAPTCHA: You've seen them, although you may not know what they're called. Captchas are those codes of random numbers and letters, typically in a distorted font that are difficult to read; the user must enter the corresponding letters and numbers into a form field before the form can be submitted. If you try to post a comment to this blog, you'll see one of these at the end of the form. The concept is that a human can interpret the letters and numbers, but a computer cannot. In my case, this was a very good thing! In the past 24 hours, I've had 59 attempts from "bots" to spam my site comments, and the captcha form stopped every one of them. Looking further back through the logs, it looks like my site receives this amount of attempts each day.

Spammers write computer scripts that search websites and automatically submit their spam message to any form they can find, such as email forms and comments. They include links in the spam message that link back to their sites, thus convincing Google that your site links to theirs and consequently increases their page ranking in the search engine. Good for them, bad for you because you end up with all sorts of male enhancement ads on your site. If you receive these spam messages via email from your website or on your website in the form of comments, ask your webmaster to install a captcha form!

You've likely heard of a "Landing Page" before, but do you know what it is? At its most generic level, it simply means the first page that people "land on" when they visit your site. This is most often the home page, but not always. If your site is fully indexed in a search engine, people may click from the search engine to one of your lower-level pages (not the top-level home page). This is why it's so important to have a navigation menu on all pages of your site, in case someone lands on a lower-level page, you want to make it easy to find out more information about your organization.

Unique Landing Pages are often used in marketing plans to measure ROI (return on investment). If you have an ad in a magazine, the yellow pages, on the radio, or even on another website, you can create a unique landing page as the call to action. Thus, when someone sees, hears or clicks from your ad, they go to yoursite.com/landing-page, giving you the ability to measure the visits to that particular page. For instance, let's say I place an ad in the Yellow Pages of the phone book. I can include in the ad, "For a special discount coupon, visit http://www.reevesdigital.com/yellow-pages." On my site, I create that landing page, but I don't put in any links to it from anywhere else on the site. I don't want anyone to accidentally stumble on to that page, I want them to get there only because they saw the ad in the phone book. Then I can measure the statistics on this one page alone, seeing just how effective it was of the course of the year. Then this tells me whether I should invest in another yellow pages ad the next year, or if I should spend my advertisting budget elsewhere. Furthermore, by including a coupon on this page, I can see not only how effective my yellow pages ad was in getting people to my site, but also how effective my web page was in converting them into a customer by how many people redeem the coupon. Over time you can tweak the message and design on your website to see what it takes to draw in more customers.

Google Analytics makes it easy to evaluate your top landing pages. If you have a unique landing page you want to evaluate, you can create an advanced segment to analyze. If you're just interested in seeing which pages are landed on first the most frequently, you can look under Content >> Top Landing Pages. This is useful in understanding which pages your customers find most useful because they either bookmark them (add them to their favorites) or it's what they're searching for and finding in the search engines.

If you're looking at your site statistics via Google Analytics, you'll notice in addition to page views, another common segmentation of your stats are "visits" and "visitors". This is very useful when trying to understand your customers and their loyalty to your business and website. Google defines them as,

Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.

The statistic "Pages/Visit" is the simple mathematical calculation of your total number of pages viewed divided by the number of visits or sessions. If your number here is under 2, then most people are either a) finding the information they need on your landing page - typically your home page, b) they are frustrated by your site and don't click around to another page, or c) found your site by accident via inappropriate keywords and didn't want to see your site at all. If your number is higher, then your site visitors are staying on your site, enticed by the home page to click to another page or more to get the information they need.

The statistic "% New Visits" gives you a good idea of how often your customers are returning to your site within the given timeframe (by default one month). A high percentage here means a lot of new people are coming to your site each month, whereas a low number would indicate your existing customers are returning to your website repeatedly.

Depending on the size of your site and your goals, you'll need to interpret these numbers to decide if your site is effective. This is one of the services I offer my clients, as well as periodically evaluating what we may need to change on your site to make it more effective.

When we first started looking at website statistics, everyone liked to compare how many hits they received. There was frequent puffing of the chest when you could proudly state that your site received 10,000 hits last month, when a friend or competitor's site perhaps only received 2,000. Little did most people realize how useless that statistic truly is.

A "hit" is recorded every time a user or search engine requests a file from your web server. A web page counts as one hit. So does an image, a script, a style sheet, or anything else that may be called during the request. So for instance this page that you're looking at, at the time of this writing has the one page, 8 images, 1 object, 4 scripts and 9 style sheets; each one of these files is requested from the server and recorded as a unique hit when you look at the page, resulting in not 1 hit but 23 hits. If all you want to do is increase the number of hits, add some transparent images on each web page and your numbers will skyrocket.

A much more useful statistic is to look at the number of pages viewed on your site. This returns just the one hit on the actual page file, and doesn't worry about how many times the related images on your server are viewed, or how many times a script was loaded. There may be reasons to look at those numbers at some point, but in general it's the "page views" that you want to evaluate.

Google Analytics only records pages viewed, not such information as other files downloaded; furthermore, you can choose which pages you want to record. GA only records information about the pages in which you insert their Javascript. This is useful if your site has protected or administrative sections that aren't relevant to learning about your site visitors.

There are many ways to measure the success of your website, and they don't all involve the "hits" mentioned in the previous post. Some relate almost one-to-one with your standard brick-and-mortar store success:

• Word of mouth
• How many contacts you receive via the website (email form)
• How many website-only coupons are redeemed
• Use your imagination. Place a call-to-action on your site that isn't anywhere else.

However, you may want to measure more than this, ater all, you probably spend quite a bit of money on your site, and it's the most difficult to measure success. Analyzing your website logs can provide a lot of detail about your visitors' online experience, as well as about your visitors themselves. An easy and useful tool for analyzing traffic for any site is Google Analytics. This is a free service provided by Google, requiring only a free Google Account to get started.

By placing a hidden JavaScript at the end of each web page on your site, each time the page is viewed by a visitor, all information available about that visit is collected by Google. Based on this data collected, they provide your site statistics for your study. Information includes the basics such as how many times a page is viewed, allowing you to see which pages are your most popular, but also information such as profiling your customers (location from country and state and even city, languages, browser and operating system used, speed of Internet connection, and more), visitor loyalty (how many returned to your site vs, how many were first time visitors), length of time on your site and how many pages viewed, and more. Traffic Sources analysis offers such information as how many came directly to your site and which search engines provide the most referrals, and search terms used to find your site. Content information includes top "landing" pages - the first page viewed by a visitor, as well as top "exit" pages - the last page viewed on your site. Google Analytics offers a lot more advanced information as well, but we'll get into details about all of this later.

For now, if you're not using it yet, contact your webmaster and ask them to add Google Analytics to your website. For more information about it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics