Every month we send out Google Analytics reports to our website SEO & maintenance plan customers. These reports make it easy to see at a glance how your website is performing. But some clients may be unsure about what the various terms mean, so here we’ll outline some of the most common terms and buzzwords from our website reporting system:
- Visits: A visit to your site is when the Google Analytics tracking code is triggered on a user’s entrance to the site. Everything they then do on your site is tracked within that visit, until they leave or the session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- New and Returning Visits: Through the use of cookies, Google Analytics will know if a user has been to your site on that browser before – and if so, will track them as a Returning Visit. If no information is available in the cookies, the visitor is tracked as a New Visit.
- Visitors: The number of visitors will always be lower than the number of visits to a site, this is because some visitors will visit more than once. A visitor will be New and then Returning, but as above, if a visitor comes to the site from another computer or browser they will be seen as a different visitor.
- Bounce Rate: A confusing aspect for many people, simply put, a ‘Bounce’ is a visit to your site that exits having only looked at one page. The ‘Bounce Rate’ is the percentage of visits that only viewed one page before leaving the site.
- Pageviews: A pageview is a view of a page, simple huh? But think about how you navigate websites – do you often go to the same page several times while moving around? This means you are triggering multiple pageviews of the same page in a single session, which is why Google Analytics offers you an extra statistic: Unique Pageviews. Unique Pageviews are the number of visitors to a page, rather than the number of visits to that page – notice the subtle difference?
- Pages per Visit: This is how many pages a visitor makes in one visit. This data is used in the Depth of Visit report that shows you how deep most visits to your site are, taking deepness as the more pages you visit the deeper your visit is.
- Traffic Sources: Traffic is another word for the visits to your site but is usually used when referring to groups of visits. The source is the specific place that sent the visit to your site. Sources include Google, Twitter, Facebook, paid advertising, display ads, and loads more.
- Organic: Non paid search traffic.
- Referral: a visit through a link to your site from another site.
- (none): This includes any visits where data cannot be passed on from the entry source.
- Direct: this is usually all visits that come direct to your site, through users bookmarks for instance, or if the user types the address in to the browsers address bar manually.
- CPC: This stands for Cost per Click and refers to paid advertising, Google AdWords visits can automatically be tracked within this Medium and you can manually set up any other advertising to also be grouped under this Medium.
- Content: This refers to the pages of your website. Within the Content Reports in Google Analytics you can find out how many times your pages have been seen, how many have had unique views, the bounce rate, how users got to each page and even which links were clicked most on each page.
- Goals: Goals are something that you have to set up yourself. It is within this section that you can measure conversions to find out how well your site is performing.
- URL Destination: the measurement of how many people see a specific page, form or payment confirmation, or thank you page.
- Time on Site: a measurement of the length of time any one user spent on your site’s pages.
- Pages/Visit: Used to track how many pages users view per visit.
- Ecommerce: This is an area of Google Analytics that is most beneficial to websites that have an online shop. Using Ecommerce tracking allows you to see data for which products you have sold, how much has been spent and more.
Contact Gleneden Ridge Design directly for more information on SEO and digital marketing.
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