Visits Are Fundamental

There are some basic building blocks in web analytics and measuring web traffic to a website. This category is referred to as “foundational.” Some foundational areas of measurement include page views, visits, and unique visitors.

Using web analytics, a company can glean interesting information from visits or it’s also referred to as sessions. What is a visit, and how is it defined? A visit is defined as the duration of an individual’s (visitor/unique visitor) time and path of page views while on a particular website from the time the visitor enters that website until the time they exit. A visit can be just a single page view, 10 page views, 100 page views, and so on (Burby & Brown, 2007).

Most web analytics tools will automatically terminate a visit after 30 minutes of inactivity (Martin, 2009). Also, each time the same person visits a website, each visit is counted separately. So, if an individual goes to a website 10 different times in a month, it’s counted as 10 visits (Lurie, 2004).

At the basic level, visits can paint a picture of what visitors do on a company’s website. Visits denote users’ paths and how many pages they view.

                    Image of what a sample visit could look like. (Google, 2014)

From this, a company can start to track patterns in sessions. Examining a news site and an e-commerce site can offer some real-world and online-world examples of how visits can be useful.

For a news site, visits can reveal how many stories visitors read, what content they seek, and what sort of ads they click on. Also, visits disclose where visitors click-out/leave, are some stories too long, etc.

For an e-commerce site, visits show consumers’ paths to purchases. They can show if the consumer spends a lot of time on the site browsing. They chart consumers’ paths, such as whether they start at the home page and navigate through, or if they start at a specific product page. Visits also show the path length of a consumer starting at the home page to purchase versus the path length of a consumer starting at a product page to purchase.

Also, visits will reveal if consumers are leaving prior to or at purchase/checkout.

With the data from visits, a company can start to build information on its customers’ behaviors as well as any web design issue. Additionally, if consumers are leaving prior to checkout, there may be a payment accepted issue (not enough payment options for consumers) or problems with the checkout process.

Visits are a valuable tool—a lot of information is gleaned about how visitors use the site and how easy or difficult the site is to navigate. However, visits aren’t the only web analytic metric available to companies and digital marketers. When a company starts tying together metrics like repeat visitors and unique visitors with visits, the collected information becomes even more useful and telling. For example, with an e-commerce website, a sale may not happen on the first visit. By looking at visits and repeat visitors, the company can tell more about consumers’ shopping habits. Do they gather a lot of information prior to a purchase? Are they repeat purchasers and potentially loyal customers? By looking at visits and unique visitors, the company can tell if consumers made their decisions either prior to visiting the website or while on the website (Dainow, 2006).

References

Burby, J. & Brown, A. (Aug. 16, 2007). Web Analytics Definitions. Web Analytics Association. Retrieved from http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitionsVol1.pdf

Dainow, B. (Jan. 19, 2006). Visit vs. Session. iMedia Connect. Retrieved from http://www.imediaconnection.com/article_login.aspx?id=7862

Google. (2014). How Visits are calculated in Analytics. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en

Martin, T.F. (Jun. 12, 2009). Pageviews vs. Visits vs. Visitors. Web Product Blog. Retrieved from http://www.webproductblog.com/web-analytics/pageviews-vs-visits-vs-visitors/

Lurie, I. (Mar. 20, 2004). Hits, Sessions and Visits: Reading A Traffic Report Accurately. Portent. Retrieved from http://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/hits_sessions_and_visits_readi.htm