Each month, our clients receive a website analytics report in their email inbox with an overview of their website’s traffic for the past 30 days. How do you read it? What’s in it? Read on!
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool in the world. Installing the tracking code is easy, and we set up and manage your account for you. For the affordable price of free, Google gives you more data than you could ever need! We focus on the most useful metrics: how many visitors you received, where they came from and how engaged they were. Your report uses a few terms you may not know, so here’s what they mean. (Reports now come from Google Analytics 4, which renamed some older metrics; the old names are noted below.)
Definition of terms
- Sessions: a session is one visit: someone arrives on your website, browses it, then leaves.
- Users: the number of unique people who visited. If you have 200 sessions and 100 users, in simple terms each person visited your website twice.
- Views (formerly “pageviews,” sometimes called “hits”): every time a web page is viewed or loaded.
- Views per session (formerly “pages / session”): the average number of pages viewed per visit. If 100 sessions viewed 200 pages, that’s 2 pages per visit on average.
- Average engagement time (replaced “average session duration”): this is an important one. It tells you how long visitors actively spent on your website, on average. The more attractive, content-rich and interesting your website is, the longer people stay.
- Engagement rate and bounce rate: Google counts a visit as “engaged” when the visitor stays at least 10 seconds, views 2 or more pages, or completes a key action like submitting your contact form. Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that were not engaged, so you want it low and your engagement rate high. (Bounce rate meant something slightly different in older reports: visitors who left after viewing a single page.)
Your report also lists the cities sending the most visitors to your site.
Want more data?
There’s SO much more available in Google Analytics! The monthly report satisfies about 90% of our clients, but for the other 10%, we can:
- Send reports more often, such as weekly.
- Send additional reports, such as mobile visitors or your most popular pages.
- Give you on-demand access to all the Google Analytics reports for your website.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool. There’s more data than you’ll ever need, so focus on the most popular metrics to measure how your website is doing. Seeing a dip in traffic, or not getting as many visitors as you’d like? Write some new blog articles, post on social media, update content on your site, run a special offer or talk to a local marketing specialist. Keep in mind that some people now get answers about your business from AI assistants without visiting your site (read our thoughts on AI in website design). Above all, talk to us! We’re happy to brainstorm and help you get the most out of your website.
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
