The following is a short but sweet explanation of the terms used in the Google Analytics report to provide clarity to our clients. The different metrics are supposed to act as a guideline to identify trends and draw conclusions and to monitor the overall health of a website. With this information, you can infer business insights and potential opportunities.

New Visitors
New visitors are people who have come to your website for the first time.

Returning Visitors
Returning visitors are people who have come to your website before in the past, and are visiting it again. It can be used to determine the loyalty of a customer base – a high number of returning visitors illustrates this clearly. These are users who regularly make use of your website for a product or service.

Pageviews
Pageviews is the total number of times your web pages have been viewed for the given period of time. This is a good indication of tracking the overall interest across your website and web pages. A more detailed explanation from Google can be found here.

Avg. Visit Duration
This is the average amount of time that visitors spend on your website before navigating away or leaving the website. A longer visit indicates a visitor that is actively engaged in your website which may generate a lead. The crucial aspect is to ensure that your visitor is actively engaged in using the website. A more detailed explanation from Google can be found here.

Session
A session can be considered a period of time where a visitor is actively engaged in your website.

Num. Sessions per Visitor
This is the average number of sessions per visitor. The higher this value is gives us an idea of the engagement level of your website to visitors, and a higher value indicates good interactivity.

Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors that enter your website then immediately leave that same page without interacting with the web page. This usually means that the visitor landed on your webpage, could not find what they were looking for, and then immediately navigated away. The range of 41 to 55% is roughly average for a website, but it is crucial to understand that this can vary depending on your website. A single-page website will naturally have a higher bounce rate compared to a website consisting of multiple pages. A more detailed explanation from Google can be found here.

Conclusion

The metrics explained above serves two purposes:

  1. Demystifying the technical terminology to explain the metrics as simply as possible.
  2. Create an environment to identify trends in the data and derive valuable insights.

We hope this article accomplished those goals, and that you have a better understanding of Google Analytics as a result.

Have any questions?
Contact us on support@v4creative.com