Google Analytics is a great way to get insights into what’s happening on your web site and it’s free. It’s one of the most popular analytics packages around. But for some people all of the data can be overwhelming.

You don’t need to give everyone the same level of access to all of the data. Casual users in your organisation may only want to see the general trends in visitors numbers or the number of recent visits to a particular page.

If you have people in your organisation that want access to the analytics information, but just need an overview, I’d advise using Polaris from Desktop Reporting.

A screenshot from the polaris desktop reporting application

It’s a simple AIR application that anyone can install on their Windows, Mac or Linux machine and allows access to nearly all of the useful information in Google Analytics without overwhelming the user.

You can download it at Desktop Reporting

When a visitor to a web site types the name of a web site directly into the address bar of their browser, they arrive at site they have requested. This is called Direct Traffic. Web sites of well known companies with strong brands usually receive more direct traffic than other web sites.

You can use web analytics packages to measure how much direct traffic comes to a site versus referred traffic or organic search traffic.

All types of traffic to a web site are identified by where the visitor was before they arrived at your web site. When a person clicks on a link on a web site and arrives at another web site this is called a referral.

The site that the person clicks through from is called the referring site. Web analytics packages used to help you understand who is visiting your web site can tell you the addresses of the pages on other web sites that have referred visitors to your web site.

This can be useful for tracking the success of promotions and advertising.

All types of traffic to a web site are identified by where the visitor was before they arrived at your web site. The term Organic Search means the visits to your web site that have come from a search engines.

It means that the visitor has typed a word or phrase into a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and your web site has appeared in the results. The visitor has clicked on the link in the results that brings them to your website.

This type of information is useful because it shows you which phrases successfully bring visitors to your site. If you expect people to search on a particular word and find your web site and this phrase does not appear in your organic search results it could be for any of the following reasons.

1. you do not have any content on your web site that mentioned these words or phrases.
2. these words or phrases have not been optimised very well on your site
3. there's a lot of competition from other websites around these words or phrases and your site does not fair very well against them.

The entry page is the first web page that a visitor arrives at when visiting a web site.

It is often wrongly assumed that the most common entry page of every web site must be the home page.

Companies therefore devote a lot of time an effort to the content of their home page. Tensions can arise in companies where different departments vie for space and position on the home page. However, the majority of traffic to a web site usually comes through search engines such as Google delivering visitors directly to the page that contains the content for which they were searching.

It is not uncommon for 80-90% of a web sites traffic to come in at an entry page other than the home page.

Many people talk about "hits" when measuring how busy their website is, but this is a very technical measure. It actually refers to how many files have been requested from the server to make up all of the pages that have been viewed over a period of time.

Visitors is a much more useful measure from an organisation's perspective as it refers to how many people have visited a web site over a period of time.

There are a few key things to look for when measuring how many visitors you have.

How many of the visits to a web site are unique visits? In other words, do people visit your web site once and then never return or do you have 100,000 visits each month made by only 1000 different visitors.

How many pages do they look at on your web site?

Whether these figures are a good thing or a bad thing will depend on the type of site you have.

A web site for a sports club would expect a lot more return visits (because it has loyal supporter who check information such as scores) than a holiday cottage rental site.

User is a common term for someone who uses your web site or your software.

It can be quite a clinical term and doesn't really reflect the true nature of your relationship with the user. Depending on what type of web site you run, better terms could be:

• visitor
• reader
• customer