There used to be the simple counter placed at the bottom of web pages that showed the total visitors on a website. Now you see metrics, such as bounce rates, unique visitors, and page views, being tossed around. As exciting as it may seem to see numbers coming in for your website, it would be more efficient to use that information to improve the performance of your website. The type of information you collect through the process of analytics can be important, whether you are running a political campaign or a grassroots activist trying to gain support.

1. Know your audience. Analytics tools can provide visitor information. You can find out a range of information from a technical aspect, such as what browsers and operating systems people are using, to specifically where in the world they are from. For example, if you are running for a representative or senatorial position in California, it would be good to know if most of your visitors are coming from Pennsylvania. That way, you can make changes to your website that would better target the correct audience—constituents in California.

2. See how people are getting to your site. You can see what users are doing to get to your website. Is there something in your campaign that is memorable and driving visitors to find you directly from the address bar? There might be a problem if a grassroots call to action about health care gets most visitors who searched for the best dog food.

3. Look at your content performance. There might be a problem if everyone is leaving a certain page as soon as they enter. A page that gets almost no views might have a link that is difficult to find. You can also set goals for your site, and see if people are following through with certain functions. For instance, say all you want visitors to do is to sign up for your e-mail list and donate to your campaign or organization. By using analytics tools, such as the conversion tool on Google Analytics, you can look at your data and see if people are completing those specific actions. If not, you can see at what point they stopped and try to change the process or landing pages so that more people will finish what they started.

Now analytics tools can provide a lot of information. Rather than wandering the pages of your analytics account with no direction, it is important to identify and understand what measurements are most helpful to you. As a start, you will find an interpretation of some common and basic measurements that is worth looking at below.

• Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visits in which people enter the site and immediately leave without visiting any other page. A high bounce rate for a specific page may indicate a potential problem. Perhaps your website looks untrustworthy or people were mistakenly directed there.

• Direct Traffic: The percentage of direct visits to your site without having to go through other websites. This can be that your web address was entered on the address bar or saved as a bookmark. A high percentage means that many visitors knew exactly where and what they were looking for.

• Entry Page: The specific page in which a visitor enters your website. Interesting to see if visitors are coming to your website the way that you anticipate. You might want to change things around if people are coming in from a different page that you want.

• Landing Page: This is the page users are immediately directed to after clicking on a link. It is good to pair this up with keywords to see how certain landing pages within your website are accessed.

• Page view: The number of times a webpage is viewed. With Google Analytics, it is measured by the amount of times the tracking code gets put into effect. This number helps let you know how certain web pages within your site are doing.

• Referring Sites: This is percentage of visits to your site from other sites that linked to your web address. You are able to see where traffic is coming in most—from search engines to blogs.

• Time on Site: The average total amount of time a visitor spends on your site. It would not be ideal for a website to receive thousands of visitors every day who only visit for four or five seconds.

• Unique visitor: This is a better measurement of how many people actually visit your site. It counts the number of unique IP addresses that visit your site. Say if a person visits your website twice within a certain time range from the same computer, the person will be counted as one visitor, rather than two.

By using analytics to collect and analyze information about your website, you can change things to ultimately drive the people you want to your website.