Understand the Basics of the Monthly Report

Website analytics provide insights and data that can be used to create a better experience for website visitors.  Through analysis and trend tracking of these indicators you can begin to see how users leverage your website and where pain points or sources of frustration are for your users.  Conversely, you can also see where successes are in changing a user from a casual browser to an active participate or benefit applicant. Understanding visitor behavior is key to optimizing a website.  Below is a brief explanation of what metrics are included on the Monthly Adobe Analytics Report.

Date Range – the timeframe the report covers.

Exclude Internal SOI Traffic – This excludes all the traffic to the website that comes from any State of Illinois IP address.  This is meant to give more of a true picture of the public traffic to the website. Note:  Not all reports will have this exclusion.

Exclude Security and Scanning IP Addresses - This excludes all the IP Addresses that are being used by our Security and Accessibility partners.

Unique Visitors – The number of visitors from each unique device.  For example, if an end user visits your site multiple times from the same desktop pc, they still count as 1 unique visitor.  If that same end user visits your site on a pc and visits your site again on a mobile device, they count as 2 unique visitors. 

Visits – The number of sessions across all visitors to the website.  Learn more about what is considered a ‘Visit’. 

Total Page Views - The number of times a web page has been loaded or refreshed by a user during a specific time period. It is a web traffic metric that measures the popularity of a page's content and the overall performance of a website.

Page Views / Visit – The average number of pages viewed by a visitor, or session can provide an understanding of visitor activity and ‘stickiness’ of the content.  Use this information to evaluate the goals of website.   

Mobile vs. Non-Mobile Visits – Shows the types of devices hitting the site at a high level.  For most sites, the ratio of iPhone users to android users doesn’t really matter, but it may matter if the majority are cell phone users or desktop users.  It matters as to how the website is structured as well as how much text you place on a page.  Mobile viewers don’t want to scroll forever, they want clear navigation and less fluff than their desktop counterparts.  Mobile visitors want their information more raw and easily searchable, remember they’re on the move and moving fast, they won’t wait for rotators, scrolling text, or bother to look for information buried within documents or PDF’s, it must be right at the surface where they can find it easily. Being more mobile friendly isn’t just a public mindedness issue either, recently search engines are taking how responsive your site is into consideration when ranking your site.  If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then you are ranked lower than similar sites.  So, keep your site mobile friendly to help ensure you stay on top of the rankings. 

Top Searches – The top keywords/phrases visitors searched for on the website.  What are the visitors trying to find on the website.  Knowing what the visitors are searching for will allow optimization of related content which will increase visibility.  Use the information to strengthen tags and/or search engine optimization settings.

Top Pages – Identifies the content of most interest to the public regardless of intent by administration, meaning this is where people are finding value and usable information TODAY.  These items should be the focus points on the website and can be surfaced to bring further awareness to them. Maybe those items are buried in deep links, maybe they aren’t readily available content, but rather in pdf or downloads, maybe they are deep slides in a deck that no one sits through. Whatever the case, evaluate the worth of the content and find a way to bring focus to it WITHOUT hiding the information that visitors are accessing today.

Top 404 URLs – A list of broken links on the website and how many times each was clicked but not accessed.  It is highly recommended to find and fix all broken links. Correcting broken links can be done either by putting in redirects if information has been relocated OR by making sure links to that information are properly removed from other areas of the site and/or any partner sites you are able to contact.  Redirects should only be used as a temporary solution until the link can be fixed on the page.  404’s negatively effects your SEO and QA scores under Site Improve and Google Ranking.

Form Submissions – The number of times a form was started and the number of times those forms were finished.  The form completion rate is provided as well.  If the form completion rate is low, ask yourself why visitors aren’t completing the form.  Is it too hard, too long, too complicated, not understood?  The last column is the error rate, which is how many times the form gave visitors an error.  These errors can be as simple as a required field is empty or the format is incorrect. If you have excessive abandonments or errors on a form, consider removing fields or adding clarity to increase the success of that form.  Breaking a form into multiple steps can also work to help users work through it AND to help identify specific areas of trouble.

Traffic Sources and Traffic Sources Details – What sources are driving traffic to the website?  Where do the visitors come from?  How did visitors arrive at your site?  Were they referred by another website, a search engine, a newspaper article, social network, etc…?

Top Downloads – The top 10 most popular files visitors downloaded from the website.  Would the downloaded asset be better served as a content page?  Can it be more readily accessible to visitors? Most often downloaded content can always be better consumed as page content, using this information you can prioritize the migration from asset to content to get the best bang for your buck.

Top Exit Pages – The last page visited before the visitor left the website.  Is this where the visitor should be leaving?  What can be done to keep the visitor on the site longer? Ideally you want the “exit page” to be the last step in a process of accomplishing a goal.  Such goals could include, signing up for a mailing list, submitting a form, reading about a service, etc…

Additional components – There may be additional components in your report that are not covered here.