Off-site web analytics comprises web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It is crucial to determining your general web marketing strategy as well as your current strengths and weaknesses and those of your competitors. This includes the measurement of a website's share of voice (visibility), potential audience (opportunity), and buzz (comments) on the Internet as a whole.

On-site web analytics basically measure a page visitor's inside your website. That means, which landing pages encourage people to buy. This kind of web analytics focuses on the perfor|mance of your website in a commercial context. The provided data is compared against key performance indicators, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response. There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data. The first method is logfile analysis: reading the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions. The second method is page tagging: using JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is displayed on a browser. Both methods collect information provides web traffic reports.

But there is more to be learnt on how your web site visitors react to your page: sales and lead information, e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, and user performance data such as click heat mapping.

Hit - A request for a file from the web server. The number of hits received by a website is meaningful to assert a website´s popularity. However, the total number of visitors or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity.

Page view - A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis.

Visit / Session - A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request. A single pageview event does not constitute a visit or a session (and it is known as a "bounce", meaning that the page was not what the visitor was looking for).

First Visit / First Session - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits.

Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User - The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server within a defined time period. A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor's computer, via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. That means that the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.

Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit. The period between the last and current visit is called visitor recency and is measured in days.

New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits. Since this definition nay create a certain amount of confusion, it is sometimes substituted with analysis of first visits.

Impression - Anytime you see a banner is an "impression". An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's screen.

Singletons - The number of visits where only a single page is viewed. This is used to identify forms of Click fraud and also to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identify automatons bots.

Bounce Rate - The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site.

% Exit - The percentage of users who exit from a page.

Visibility time - The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is displayed on screen.

Session Duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. Page View Duration / Time on Page - Average amount of time that visitors spend on each page of the site.

Active Time / Engagement Time - Average amount of time that visitors spend actually interacting with content on a web page, based on mouse moves, clicks, hovers and scrolls.

Page Depth / Page Views per Session - Page Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views per Session or PV/Session.

Frequency / Session per Unique - Frequency measures how often visitors come to a website. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the total number of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure the loyalty of your audience.

Click path - the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site.

Click - A click refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another.