Basic Terminology in Google Analytics

When designing a website, finding out who it performs is one of the most important parts.  Having access to information about your visitors and their behavior on your website can be extremely valuable to you.  It allows you to adjust content to make it more engaging, find ways to give people what they are looking for easier, improve your relationship with search engines and much more.

The most popular analytics tool these days is Google Analytics.  It offers and extremely extensive list of features, tracks a lot of information and it's free.

WebWiz@rd is design to allow clients to easily add Google Analytics to their website with only a few clients.  One they tracking code from Google has been installed, you have instant access to the wealth of information they track for you.

In this post I am going to get you familiar with the most basic terms in Google Analytics:

1. Acquisition - this section talks about how your visitors got their (ie. search engines)
    
2. Avg. Session Duration - this is the average time someone spends on your site
    
3. Behavior - this section is designed to help you improve the content on your site to meet the needs and expectations of your users
    
4. Bounce Rate - is the number of visits in which they left your site from the entrance page without going anywhere else on your website.
    
5. Campaigns - allows you to add information to your URLs from your website to collect more information about your referral traffic.
    
6. Conversions - are the number of times goals have been completed on your website.
    
7. Goals - let you measure how often users take or complete specific actions on your website (reach your contact page or make it to your shopping cart).
    
8. Metrics - are individual elements that can be measured as a sum or a ratio (Pages/Session and Average Session Duration are examples of metrics in Google Analytics.)
    
9. New Sessions - an estimate of the percentage of first-time visits (this is only partially accurate as is tries to track you from your computer but you could come back from a different computer later that day and it would count as well as a new visitor).
    
10. Pages/Session - is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
     
11. Pageviews - is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
     
12. Sessions - is the period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc., within a date range. All usage data (Screenviews, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.
     
13. Users - is someone who have had at least one session within the selected date range. Includes both new and returning users.