Bounce rate: is a metric that shows the percentage of entrances on any individual page that resulted in the visitor’s immediate exit from the site
One of the reason for having high bounce rate and high exit rate is when no call to action is existed on the site, web masters need to make a clear call to action by adding Buy Now buttons or limited-time offer for example to encourage visitors to take action and add the products to their baskets.
High bounce rate could indicate that something is wrong with the website design or content, also it might suggest that the source of your traffic is referring untargeted traffic.

However high bounce rate is a good metric that can help you identify whether any particular campaign is reaching the right audience and identify suspect high levels of click fraud on a pay per click (PPC) campaign. Another way to reduce the bounce rate is to reduce the number of external links on the webpage.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Most firms measure their web activity because they have they want to know how effective their marketing and advertising campaigns are.

Measuring the marketing campaigns:
Fortunately for online business the Internet makes the process of measuring the marketing campaigns very easy. We can know who view the ad, when and how many times, who clicks on it, furthermore we can know where are they from even in which city do they live, what language do they speak and what computer system do they use, all the above information can be obtained in real time bases, which makes online marketing communication much better approach than offline marketing communication.

Not only it is faster and easier to track any marketing campaign online than offline, it is also much less expensive to make any adjustments to the advertising message if there is need to do so.

Using site visitor activity data:
The best way to understand user’s behaviour is watching them using the website, and analyse their movements and behaviour, all this information needed to do the above, can be obtained from the traffic log file where visitor activity data is stored.

Log files can reveal to online business the user’s background such as the exact time they visit, from which country and city they are from, what language they use and if they were referred by search engine what keyword or phrase did they use to come to the webpage, also information such as where do users click? Can they find important features easily? Are visitors spending time on the site, and if so, where?

Nevertheless server logs are difficult to read therefore web analytics program is needed. Web Analytics According to Traction Search (2007) web analytics is “a tool that collects data on web site users behaviour” Bruce Clay the leading provider of search engine marketing services (2007) stated that Web Analytics is essential for improving the performance of web sites and marketing campaigns. It also identifies the areas within the site that can be improved for better performance, and measure and track the results of any marketing campaigns.

However traffic analysis presents more questions than it answers. For instance, the log file may reveal that 90% of the users leave the site after the first page, but it doesn’t explain the reasons for that. Is the site very slow? Or is the design confusing? Or maybe the marketing message was targeting the wrong people?

Therefore for online business to be able to use this method effectively and read in-between the charts and graphs the web analytics program provides, they have to have some knowledge of their target market, web design, and Human–computer interaction.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Vendors of page-tagging analytics solutions have used third-party cookies, that is cookies sent from the vendor’s domain instead of the domain of the website being browsed.
Third-party cookies can handle visitors who cross multiple unrelated domains within the company’s site, since the cookie is always handled by the vendor’s servers.
However, third-party cookies in principle allow tracking an individual user across the sites of different companies, allowing the analytics vendor to collate the user’s activity on sites where he provided personal information with his activity on other sites where he thought he was anonymous.

Although web analytics companies deny doing this, other companies such as companies supplying banner ads have done so. Privacy concerns about cookies have therefore led a noticeable minority of users to block or delete third-party cookies. In 2005, some reports showed that about 28% of Internet users blocked third-party cookies and 22% deleted them at least once a month.
Most vendors of page tagging solutions have now moved to provide at least the option of using first-party cookies (cookies assigned from the client subdomain).
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Popularity: 24% [?]

There are no globally agreed definitions within web analytics as the industry bodies have been trying to agree definitions that are useful and definitive for some time.
The main bodies who have had input in this area have been Jicwebs (Industry Committee for Web Standards), The WAA (Web Analytics Association) and to a lesser extent the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). This does not prevent the following list from being a useful guide, suffering only slightly from ambiguity. Both the WAA and the ABCe provide more definitive lists for those who are declaring their statistics using the metrics defined by either.

• Hit - A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website’s actual popularity. The total number of visitors or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity.
• Page View - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.
• Visit / Session - A series of requests from the same uniquely identified client with a set timeout. A visit is expected to contain multiple hits (in log analysis) and page views.
• First Visit / First Session - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits.
• Visitor / Unique Visitor/UniqueUser - The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. N.B. The Unique User is now the only mandatory metric for an ABCe audit.
• Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period between the last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.
• New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits. This definition creates a certain amount of confusion (see common confusions below), and is sometimes substituted with analysis of first visits.
• Impression - An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a users screen. Anytime you see a banner, that is an impression.
• Singletons - The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. While not a useful metric in and of itself the number of singletons is indicative of various forms of “Click Fraud” as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identify automatons (”bots”).
• Bounce Rate - The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.
• Funnel analysis Regardless of your visitors’ initial wandering path on your website, they must often pass through a well-defined series of pages in order to convert. It is possible to see the efficiency of each step in this linear process. The funnel narrows as people drop off during each step. High drop-off percentages may signal that a particular step is especially problematic. If problems are uncovered, they may suggest breaking the process up into smaller and more manageable steps, or simplifying it. E-commerce shopping cart abandonment is a common example of this kind of funnel analysis.
• Top exit pages Exit pages are the pages where visitors leave your site. Each exit page can be viewed as a leaky bucket. If visitors exit your site, they probably did not find what they were looking for. In some cases, there is nothing that you can do about this. But for many of the visitors who left, you could have probably improved the page to provide more relevant information or better navigation. The total number of exits and the exit percentage of a page can be used to prioritize among problem pages.
• landing page The first page that a visitor lands on as a result of a traffic acquisition activity. The landing page can be a stand-alone page, a part of a special-purpose microsite, or a page on the company’s main website.
• Click-through rate The percentage of Web page viewers who click on a particular link (also abbreviated CTR). CTR is often applied to the percentage of Internet users who click on a PPC advertisement and land on the advertiser’s landing page.
• Multivariate testing A type of landing page testing methodology where data is collected while simultaneously changing a number of different experimental variables (contrast with A-B split testing
• Deep linking In PPC campaigns,the practice of landing traffic on the most relevant landing page possible within a website.
• Cloaking The practice of showing different content to search engine spiders and human visitors to a Web page for the purposes of manipulating the ranking of the page in search engine results
• A-B split testing The simplest form of landing page testing. A new visitor to the page is randomly shown either the original version (“A”) or an alternative version (“B”).

Popularity: 33% [?]

Both logfile analysis programs and page tagging solutions are readily available to companies that wish to perform web analytics. In many cases, the same web analytics company will offer both approaches. The question then arises of which method a company should choose. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.

Advantages of logfile analysis

The main advantages of logfile analysis over page tagging are as follows.

1. The web server normally already produces logfiles, so the raw data is already available. To collect data via page tagging requires changes to the website.
2. The web server reliably records every transaction it makes. Page tagging relies on the visitors’ browsers co-operating, which a certain proportion may not do (for example, if JavaScript is disabled).
3. The data is on the company’s own servers, and is in a standard, rather than a proprietary, format. This makes it easy for a company to switch programs later, use several different programs, and analyze historical data with a new program. Page tagging solutions involve vendor lock-in.
4. Logfiles contain information on visits from search engine spiders. Although these should not be reported as part of the human activity, it is important data for performing search engine optimization.
5. Logfiles contain information on failed requests; page tagging only records an event if the page is successfully viewed.

Advantages of page tagging

The main advantages of page tagging over logfile analysis are as follows.

1. The JavaScript is automatically run every time the page is loaded. Thus there are fewer worries about caching.
2. It is easier to add additional information to the JavaScript, which can then be collected by the remote server. For example, information about the visitors’ screen sizes, or the price of the goods they purchased, can be added in this way. With logfile analysis, information not normally collected by the web server can only be recorded by modifying the URL.
3. Page tagging can report on events which do not involve a request to the web server, such as interactions within Flash movies.
4. The page tagging service manages the process of assigning cookies to visitors; with logfile analysis, the server has to be configured to do this.
5. Page tagging is available to companies who do not run their own web servers.

Economic factors

Logfile analysis is almost always performed in-house. Page tagging can be performed in-house, but it is more often provided as a third-party service. The economic difference between these two models can also be a consideration for a company deciding which to purchase.

1. Logfile analysis typically involves a one-off software purchase; however, some vendors are introducing maximum annual page views with additional costs to process additional information.
2. Page tagging most often involves a monthly fee, although some vendors offer installable page tagging solutions with no additional page view costs.

Which solution is cheaper often depends on the amount of technical expertise within the company, the vendor chosen, the amount of activity seen on the web sites, the depth and type of information sought, and the number of distinct web sites needing statistics.

Hybrid methods
Some companies are now producing programs which collect data through both logfiles and page tagging. By using a hybrid method, they aim to produce more accurate statistics than either method on its own. The first Hybrid solution was produced in 1998 by Rufus Evison who then spun the product out to create a company based upon the increased accuracy of hybrid methods.
Other methods
Other methods of data collection have been used, but are not currently widely deployed. These include integrating the web analytics program into the web server, and collecting data by sniffing the network traffic passing between the web server and the outside world.

There is also another method of the page tagging analysis. Instead of getting the information from the user side, when he / she opens the page, it’s also possible to let the script work on the server side. Right before a page is sent to a user it then sends the data.

Popularity: 42% [?]