Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

mike.strock

Not sure if this should go here, or in Pro support, but I'll start here.

I've added Google Analytics to my pages recently, and I'm seeing pageviews, etc for the various pages.

A few questions for the Analytics savvy folks in the audience:

o Can I define a common name for a directory instead of the long URL given to a SmugMug gallery (ie: /gallery/5345182_GPB3b/1/326834236_hRhXR ) which is what shows up on the Analytics reports?

o I'm confused as to why my 'Pageviews' are high but my unique pageviews are so much lower. Why is that?

o What's a 'Bounce Rate'? Why do I want one, or do I?


Oh well. I guess that's it....I thought I had more questions. But I'll start with those for now.



Thanks.

Mike

Art Scott

Pageviews
The reason why there is a difference in the 2 types of pages views is retuning lookers from the same IP address......if you get one person that looks at your site 1000 times a day or week from the same location this would not be a unique page view.......but if you get 1000 different people from 1000 different IP addresses then this is unique and this is really good...it is good to have repeat viewers also but you might start toi suspect aht something is amiss if that person keeps constantly comingg back to the same image or gallery, probably trying to steal a better version of what they like

mike.strock

Thanks Art. For most of my galleries, the pageviews correspond to the unique views, there are three galleries, however, that has 411 pageviews with 14 unique. Another has 329 pageviews with 29 unique. A third gallery has 276 pv versus 29 unique.

It's entirely possibly, since these are "very small market" galleries, but seems kinda disproportionate.

Mike.