Visitor Tracking 101

If you’re learning about Search Engine Marketing, understanding how analytics and tracking works is an important part of it.

All the decisions you make should be based on the site’s analytics, but in order to understand it you need to know the terminology. Here we’ll try to explain what they mean.

Page Views shows you the total number of pages that visitors load on your site. It’s not the best measuring stick, since pages are refreshed some times.

Unique Page Views show you only one visit to each page, even if someone hit refresh three times on a single page.

Frequently visited pages show you the most popular pages on your site.

Visitors tells you how many people visit your site, but it’s not an accurate measurement as it can include bots and search engine spiders.

Unique Visitors show you every visitor only once in your statistics, so you know the number of people that visit your site, not just the number of visits.

Page Views Per Visit shows you how sticky the site is. A high number of pages per visit is especially important for sites that base their earnings on CPM.

Time Per Visit tells you how much time they spend on your site, measured in minutes usually, the higher the average the better.

Geographic Location tells you where do people come from, so you know if the traffic comes from India or the United States.

Referring URL – this tells you the source of your visitors (ads, search engines, forums or blogs).

Links Clicked On Page – in some cases, analytics programs will tell you what links are clicked by visitors.

Referring Links Anchor Texts – from a SEO point of view, it’s important to know the anchor links of URL’s that people click to come to your site.

Click Through Rate – tells you how many clicks there are per thousand of impressions.

Cost Per Acquisition – this term shows you the cost of each client brought to your site.