Chapter 5. Keeping Up with the Stats

More than two billion worldwide Internet users, or more than a quarter of the world population, spent 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in 2011. About 25 billion tweets were sent on Twitter, a quarter billion of Internet users signed up on Facebook, and a total of 176 million blogs populate the Internet. Two sentences ago, you probably never knew these impressive facts, but all of this data is derived through analytics.

In the previous chapters, we learned how to engage visitors on our site by building memberships, social networks, and sending out newsletters. In this chapter, we're going to switch gears by learning some basic web analytics implementations, gauge our social engagement efforts, what they mean and how to report them.

Here's what's in store for the next several pages:

• The big deal behind hits versus pageviews

• Defining absolute unique visitors, bounce rates, and conversion rates

• Tracking links (campaigns) through Google Analytics and bitly

• Comparing...