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Basic Terms You Should Know For Google Analytics

By Shuxian Huang on December 10th, 2009

Campaign Operations Executive, clickTRUE. Managing & optimising campaigns for clients. A keen eye for details and enjoys researching on keywords. Loves gadgets, fashion and music.

in Web Analytics | No Comments

If you are a webmaster or campaign manager who is new to Google Analytics, this post will provide you with a short overview on some of the essential terms or jargons that you should understand while trying to comprehend the intimidating amount of data and statistics that you will see once your account is up. To have a better idea on how you can start tracking your website, refer to Jereme’s post on some useful tips & video guides that can help you start tracking your website.

Once you have done the necessary steps for setting up a Google Analytics account, logging into the interface will reveal a dashboard with statistics on the interaction between the users and your website. Visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc…. So what do these metrics mean to you?

Here is a brief explanation on the terms/jargons:-

Visit – Also known as session. A period of interaction between a visitor’s browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time (by default, set as 30 minutes by Google Analytics). By making some changes to the tracking code (refer to Google Analytics Help Page for the code change), you can customise your own timeout session, if preferred.

Pageview – A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded by the browser. Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. To ensure accurate tracking, it is important that you have your tracking code installed correctly on the pages that you wish to track, preferably at the bottom of the content and immediately before the </body> tag.

Pages/Visits – A self-explanatory term, simply the average number of pageviews per visit. This metric tells you how engaging the content is on your website. Therefore the higher the value, the better the content your website is on keeping visitors on your site.

Average time on site – Refers to the average time a visitor spent on your website. It seems that the concept on how it is calculated can be rather complicated. If you are keen to learn more, head over to Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik who explains the difference between time on page and time on site.

New Visits - The percentage of visits by people who have never visited your site before. This statistic is particularly useful when you have launched online marketing campaigns through the various channels and wish to track the performance or the contribution of the campaigns.

Bounce rate – The “Hot” metric recently which refers to the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. It is described that a good website with compelling and relevant content should have a low bounce rate. This definition is suggested to be inaccurate to a certain extend if you consider users that spend a long time finishing a content filled article on a single page. This is especially the case for blogs or news sites. To track the “real bounce rate”, there are alternatives like defining a bounce as users who spend less than a specified amount of time on site (e.g less than 10 seconds).

Web analytics is more than just knowing the statistics and data. It is about how you can use those numbers to improve your website quality and the optimizing the traffic quality coming into your site. If you are looking for more advanced support and consultancy services on analytics, contact us @ clickTRUE to find out more!