Difference between web analytics and other experiments in Zoho PageSense | Help Guide

Difference between web analytics and other experiments in PageSense

Web analytics in PageSense helps you track, analyze, and record more valuable website metrics about your visitor's actions and behavior on your site. This report shows you numbers and graphs that provides a overall picture of the key performance metrics on your website like the total number of visitors who visit your site, how they land (channels and traffic sources) on your site, how many sessions they had on your site, which pages they enter and exit your site, how long they spent on your site, and more.

So, once you get a whole picture of the KPIs on your website, you can start exploring the why and how part of the website analytics using the variety of CRO tools available in PageSense, such as funnel analysis, heatmap, session recordings, A/B testing, and more.

But, PageSense is somewhat unique in the way it tracks and collects your web analytics data when compared to other experiments within the tool. Below are a few primary differences listed in the table:

 


Web analytics


Other experiments/features

 

01.


Web analytics starts automatically collecting data from all visitors and all pages on your website as soon as you install the PageSense code snippet in it.

It doesn't require you to configure experiments on your web pages to collect visitor information.


Needs you to configure and launch the experiment on your website to start collecting visitors and pages data once  you install the PageSense code snippet in it.

 

02.


Web analytics track data based on Sessions. Here, a Session refers to the set of actions or interactions made by a user (both new and returning visitor) on your website in a given time period. By default, a Session will expire after 30 minutes of visitor inactivity.




For example, say a 'Visitor A' enters your website and performs a few clicks or interactions on a page. In web analytics, this interaction will be counted as a '1 session'. Now, if the same visitor re-enters your site after 30 minutes of inactivity, then the previous session will expire, and the session data will be increased to '2'. In this case, the returning visitor will be identified as 'Visitor B.'

 
Other experiments track data based on Unique Visitors. Here, a Unique Visitor means a person who has visited your website at least once and is counted only once. This means irrespective of whether they are new or returning to your site, a visitor will be counted only once until they clear their cookies from their web browser.


For example, say a 'Visitor A' enters your website and performs a few clicks or interactions on a page. Under your experiment report, this visitor will be counted only as '1' unique visitor until they manually clear their cookies from web browser; no matter how many times they return to the website. Learn how PageSense uses cookie-based tracking to identify and track visitors coming to your website.

 

 


03.


Web analytics tracks quantitative data on your website, such as visitors, sessions, traffic sources, page views, bounce rate, and average session duration. This helps identify where your website traffic comes from and what it does on your site.


Other features in the tool provide you qualitative data that describes what your visitors are looking for on your site, which elements they click or interact with on your pages, and why they behave the way they do.


04.

 

Data calculation with an example
Let's understand how data is calculated in web analytics with respect to sessions by considering the Unique Pageviews metric. 


Unique Pageviews is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. For instance, if 'Visitor A' visits or views the 'abc.com' in 4 different sessions, then the unique pageview will be counted as '4' in web analytics.


Here, if the visitor lands on your web page multiple times within 30 minutes duration (i.e. a single session), then the visitor will be considered as a unique visitor. Post 30 minutes, if the same visitor lands on the same web page, it will be counted as a new session and the visitor will be considered as a returning visitor.

 

Data calculation with an example

Let's understand how data is calculated in other experiments with respect to unique visitors by considering the Unique Pageviews metrics.

Unique Pageviews are the number of times a web page was viewed by visitors in a given time period. For instance, if 'Visitor A' visits or views a page on your website 'abc.com' in 4 different times, then PageSense will count this as '1' unique visitor and '1' unique pageview under your experiment report.

 
Until a visitor deletes the cookies from their web browser, they will be regarded as unique visitors. When the cookie is cleared, users will be considered as new visitors.


We hope this documentation helps make the process easy for you. Please feel free to reach out to us anytime by dropping an email to support@zohopagesense.com if you need more explanation or have any questions.