Just getting started with Google Analytics? You’ve come to the right place!
Google Analytics, the free analytics tool from Google, can be confusing when you first dive in.
Fortunately, once you get familiar with the basic terms, it becomes easy to use and opens whole new worlds of insight regarding your web traffic.
In this first post, we’re going to start at the start and have a look at the Standard Reporting Audience Overview (or “Visitors Overview” as it’s often called). This is the first screen you generally see when you log in and looks like what you see below:
So… what are we looking at?
- The date range is shown in the top right and can be changed to any range you like by clicking on the drop-down arrow.
- The line graph you see represents the number of visits by day and can be changed to include other metrics (although we’ll leave that for another post).
- The Pie Chart at the bottom right shows the proportion of New Visitors (people who Google has not tracked as having previously visited your site) versus Returning Visitors, who as the name suggests, are visitors that Google has tracked as having visited your site previously.
Note that your Returning Visitor stats are likely under-reported in practical terms as visitors who come to your site from multiple different computers or browsers will be shown as New Visitors.
The metrics shown on the left side of the interface are defined as follows:
- In “#### people visited this site, “people” refers to Unique Visitors (below).
- Visits refers to the total number of visits to your site. Many visitors will come to your site more than once, which is why Visits is virtually always significantly higher than Unique Visitors.
- Unique Visitors refers to the total number of visitors from the same computer/browser. For instance, if you had 400 Visits from 200 Unique Visitors, this means that your Unique Visitors visited the site an average of 2 times each.
- Pageviews refers to the number of individual pages that were viewed during your date range.
- Page/Visit, as the name implies, is an average of how many pages were viewed on each visit to the site.
- Avg. Time on Site is the amount of time (in minutes) that were spent per visit to your site. In this example, visitors spent an average of 1 minute and 59 seconds on the site.
- Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who landed on a single page on your site and left the site without navigating to a second page. In general, bounces are considered “bad” although in some cases (i.e. if someone is looking for your phone number and finds it on the first page), it isn’t necessarily a negative thing.
- % New Visits refers to the percentage of visits where the visitors where not tracked as having previously visited the sites.
Upon reviewing these stats a lot of folks wonder what their stats “should” be. My typical answer is “there is no right number as every business is different.” What I usually recommend is that folks look at which stats they can work on improving and try to bump up the numbers in those areas. For instance, if you improve your site to make it more “sticky,” you’ll hope to see a corresponding increase in the Pages/Visit.
There are any number of examples like this but we’ll save them for future posts!
In our next post we’ll have a look at the Traffic Sources Overview page (which is possibly the most important section of all!).