Nov. 13, 2018
A website’s analytics — discoverable via services such as Google Analytics — can help in boosting marketing and other content, identifying website traffic origins, and knowing where to focus efforts that will give visitors the best possible experience. There is much to decipher in those metrics, so it’s important to understand the pieces.
1. Visits or Sessions
Put simply, this means the total number of times a website has been visited overall. For example, if one person visits a website four times, it will be recorded as four visits.
2. Unique Visitors or Users
This is the number of individual visitors to a website within a specified time period. If one person visits a website four times during that period, for instance, it will be recorded as one unique visitor.
3. Page Views or Impressions
This denotes total number of times a webpage has been viewed. Specifically, this represents when a visitor lands on the website and clicks through to view multiple pages. Each of these webpages viewed is categorized as a page view or impression. If the same page is viewed more than once by the same person, it will be counted multiple times.
4. Pages per Visit
Pages per visit is the average number of pages viewed during a visit to a website. This shows how engaged a user is with the content on the site. If the same page is viewed more than once by the same person, it will be tallied multiple times.
5. Average Duration or Time on Site
This is simply the average amount of time (in seconds or minutes) that users spend on the website during a visit or session.
6. Bounce Rate
This rate is a percentage that is calculated by taking the number of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left the website from the entrance page without interacting with it) as a percentage of the total visits.
7. Click-Through Rate
This rate shows how often users click on an advertisement or website link out of all the times it gets shown on a page or in search results.
8. Traffic Sources
This is a breakdown of where and from what sources the website visitors originate. Such data can then be broken down into organic traffic from natural search listings; pay-per-click traffic from paid search campaigns; referral traffic from other websites, blogs, social media, etc.; direct traffic from a user who has typed in the web address into the browser or arrived at the website via a bookmarked link; or email marketing or social media ad campaigns.
9. Audience Reports
These reports offer insightful information about website visitors. For example, data for this can show what percentage of visitors are new users and what percentage are returning users. In addition, it can provide information about what countries or cities visitors hail from, what type of internet browser they are using, and whether they’re using a mobile device or desktop.
10. Conversion Rates or Goals
This metric derives from a sale or purchase, completion of a form, a sign-up to a service, an appointment made, or a downloaded item.