10 Website Terms Every Website Owner Should Know— Beginner-Friendly  Data Analytics

One of the most important skills you need to have if you own a website, a Facebook page, or simply a page on any social media platforms is, measuring your analytics.

Analytics is the easiest way for you to improve your marketing efforts, and grow your business based on real data from real people/users. By discovering what people search for, what pages they visit the most, which campaigns are best performers.

Analytics will guide you on what is working and what is not, ultimately showing you what to fix to improve the performance of your website or eCommerce store to increase the return on your efforts.

This list includes the most basic terms a new website owner should know, even if you are just planning to launch your website, it’s a kick-start for you. Enjoy…

1. User/Visitors

Just like you might talk about customers or clients in the real-world shop or physical store.

E-commerce websites/online stores use visitors also known as users or traffic to refer to customers.

A person who visits your website is called a user or a visitor. They might visit your website using a desktop computer, mobile application, Smart TV browser, or tablet.

There are two types of users/visitors you need to know.

• New User: A person who visits your website for the first time.

• Returning User: A person who visited your website before

If someone visited your website the first time, they are a new user. So, when they go through your products and services and find one they like, they might come back tomorrow to make a purchase or a reservation which makes them a returning user.

2. Keyword/s

A Keyword is a specific term a user or website visitor searches for while they are looking for your business, products, or services.

For example, if you are in the fashion industry, many people might be finding your website after searching for one of the following keywords — “men’s shoes” or “ladies’ bags” depending on what you sell.

Tip: If you are using S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) as a way to make your website visible in the search engines for users to find your products or services — Consider keeping track of your most performing keywords, revising them to optimizing performance.

You can read about other ways of making your website visible here.

3. Landing Page

This is the first page a user or website visitor views when they click on your social media link or when they get to your website.

For example, when you search for “mobile banking” in the search bar and you click on one of the links from the search results, you land on what we call the “landing page”. It could be their home page; it could be a product page or sign up page.

Tip: A successful landing page usually has one call-to-action. (One specific call-to-action/where you want the user to go after clicking on your button)

If you want to create free and customized landing pages, you can easily do that in Wix. Watch this video to learn how.

4. Page Views

This is the total number of pages your users/visitors view when they get to your website. Even if a visitor clicks away from your website a few seconds after opening it, it’s still counted as a view. Views are sometimes referred to as impressions.

Depending on how much traffic/visitors your website gets, overall navigation and structure, and how engaged your visitors are, you might manage to get over 10-page views per visitor/user. Of course, there are other factors to consider like the quality of traffic, etc.

Tip: If you are measuring data/ analytics, this will help you to know how many people visited your page and how much time they spent on each page which helps you to discover your worst performing and improve the best performing pages.

5. Bounce Rate

This is a scenario so to say. A situation where your visitor does not take any action or do anything on your website or mobile app when they open it.

Well, sometimes you might have a (60 seconds) one-minute video on your page but only a few people watch the first 3 seconds. Which means the bounce rate on your video page is high.

After doing some work and improving may be the lighting of the video or the background, from your analytics dashboard, you start noticing more people staying longer and watching more of the video. Which means the bounce rate is now lower.

Another example, Let’s say you get about 20 visitors a day and among the twenty, only 3 clicked on your button. It means your bounce rate is high.

6. Cookie

Have you shopped with Amazon before? Even if you just have an account with Amazon, you might have noticed that every time you sign in your shop is customized or re-arranged. Now, that is the power of a cookie.

A cookie is very powerful. Usually found in many website analytics tools. It allows you to do what we call re-targeting or re-marketing. (Marketing to people who have already shown interest in your products or services)

Imagine someone who came into your shop and walked out without purchasing anything. As they walk out, you put a tracking device in their pocket. You can use this device to send them promotional offers for the same product they looked at while at your store.

What Else Does the Cookie Do?

• Used to gather helpful information to improve user experience

• Increase the success of marketing campaigns by helping you re-market to people already interested in your products.

• Tells you how many new and returning visitors you have.

What Else Do I Need to Know about the Cookie?

• It is only stored in someone’s browser/pocket for a specific period (Usually 30–60 days).

• If the user clears their browser cookies, or switches a browser, they are recorded as new users.

Tip: Facebook pixel allows you to do re-targeting by allowing you to advertise to people who visited your website and took a specific action, maybe clicked on the “Buy” button but didn’t complete their checkout, even if they just viewed a specific page on your website.

Want learn more about Facebook Advertising? Watch this… or learn how to install the Facebook pixel in your Wix site in this video.

7. Conversion Rate

Conversion on the internet space means success in the simplest terms. The higher your conversion rate, the greater your success. Conversion rate means the number of people that perform a specific action on your landing page/website compared to the number of visitors/traffic to your landing/website.

Conversion rate is something you need to keep improving in a process known as conversion rate optimization. It is the process through which you collect or gather data about what is working and improving it, and seeing what is not working and either removing it or fixing it.

Conversion rate and conversion rate optimization are two very important metrics you should know as a website/e-commerce store owner.

8. Metrics

Metrics are measures. Either in quantity or amount of something. Commonly used for comparing, and tracking performance or production. We have already looked at a few metrics if you look closely.

Here is a quick true story about me and metrics…

In early 2013, I was working in a supermarket. We used to do most of the measurements in grams and kilograms.

In late 2013, I started doing metal fabrication doing most of the measurements in inches, feet, and centimetres.

Fast forward to 2018 when I started Digital Marketing dealing with website data analytics and campaign performance with totally different metrics.

Anyways, if you look closely, a few of the metrics we have mentioned today include bounce rate, page views, conversion rate, revenue which is related to conversion, among others.

9. Traffic Source

You already know what (website) traffic is, right? (The number of visitors/users on your website and the number of pages they visit)

A traffic source is a special place that your visitors come from to visit your website. It could be a social media channel like Twitter or Pinterest with your website link, a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, it could also be a referral.

It could even be another website linking to yours.

Tip: Many platforms are integrated with analytics tools like Google Analytics allowing you to see all traffic sources right from your dashboard, such as Wix — Free website builder)

What else do I need to know about traffic?

There are two most important categories of traffic

• Paid Traffic — Traffic you pay to get and have control over. (Boosting posts with Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Twitter promoted tweets, LinkedIn sponsored message, among others)

• Organic (Unpaid) traffic— Organic traffic is traffic you don’t control and don’t pay for. (Search engines, social media channels, direct search or referrals…)

10.Campaign

A campaign is a specific marketing effort to drive website traffic (visitors/users) to your landing page or website. A successful campaign needs to have a specific measurable goal and a call-to-action.

A campaign may contain multiple keywords to target specific interests and demographics or behaviors.

For example, if you look at the Facebook ads structure, campaigns contain multiple ad sets that may contain multiple ads. Watch this to learn more about the Facebook Advertising structure…

Conclusion

Success in growing your business or e-commerce website using metrics.

Tip: There are other metrics you need to know. But as you launch your first website and begin to measure your website analytics, this list contains some of the most important metrics you need for success.

By the way, if you want to learn about eCommerce and how to get started selling your products or services online be sure to read this.

You can also watch this video if you want to create and launch your e-commerce store or a professional website or blog for any niche or industry in less than one hour even if you have no experience building a website.

You do not have to worry if you don’t have what to sell. If you read this, you will learn that you can succeed in selling other people’s products or other companies’ services through Affiliate marketing.

Have you tried any of these metrics before? What were the results?