Today, we'll show you how to run some simple reports to track how many visitors you have had to your site, and how many pages they viewed.
When you log into
adCenter, click on the
Analytics Tab, and then
Profiles and you will see the list of sites you have created profiles for.
A green status light means the tool has been collecting data and you are now ready to view some reports.
Click on View under Reports for the Profile you want to see data for.
Depending on how long data has been collecting for, you will see a screen that looks a bit like this:
On the left hand side find the Reports Menu. Click on Traffic & History and two options will appear.
“Visitors” is the number of unique users that have been accessing your site and viewing content over any given amount of time.
“Page Views” are the total amount of pages that were viewed by those visitors.
The number of page views is very often larger than the visitor total, as a user may look at more than one page of your site while browsing it.
A quick way to see how many visitors have been to your site in February would be to hover your mouse over the February segment of data. A tiny pop-up will appear with that month's visitor statistics.
In this case the site received 1501 unique visitors in February.
In order to see how many pages those visitors perused, click on the Page Views option in the Traffic & History menu.
You can get a quick view of data by hovering your mouse over the week or an actual day too.
To get a detailed breakdown of your traffic for a given month, week or day, simply click on the data segment and it will highlight in orange.
Below, you will see a graph showing the detailed traffic for that given time selection including Visits, Page Views & Bounce Rate.
Bounce Rate is defined as the percentage of your visitors that viewed just a single page of your site when they arrived. They may have perused the first page on which they landed but did not explore the site further. A high Bounce Rate might be OK for a blog, as readers may only arrive to read a single post. But if your site is selling products or services, you'd want users to spend some time navigating your site, so a high Bounce Rate may be a signal that you need to investigate further.
We’ll talk about analysing reasons for Bounce Rates, and how to take action in more detail in a later blog post.
The final way you can run a basic Visitor or Page View report is by clicking on Select A Custom Date Range.
This functionality enables you to see data for any given number of days, weeks or months. You may want to see your site's traffic for just a three week or six day period. This lets you click on your desired start and end time values and see how much traffic you have received during that date range.
Do check back soon as we'll be delving into some other reports in a little more detail.
Cheers
Mel - adCenter Community Team