Key terminology to monitor your websites performance
Google Analytics is a website analysis software that tracks your website usage and results. In the majority of digital marketing strategies this is used to measure your websites performance. Sometimes it is hard to understand some of the terms used in the software. This guide will give you some insight into the general terms you will come across to make sure you understand how your digital strategy is performing:
Acquisition
Section that tells you where your visitors have come from. Indicating which methods have brought your audience to the website.
Average Session Duration
The average amount of time that a user spends within the website on all different pages.
Average Time on Page
The average amount that a user spends on a page or a group of pages.
Bounce Rate
A bounce is where a user has visited a single page on your website and no action has been taken, this is measured in a percentage. If you have a high bounce rate percentage this is an indicator that there is something wrong with your website and there is no calls to action taken. Content on your website such as blog posts will have higher bounce rates due to their nature.
Clicks
Clicks are the amount of clicks that you get on a single page this is measured as a whole number, for example you may have 300 clicks for the services page of your website in a month.
CTR (Click through rate)
Click through rates are a measurement used when advertising. Measured as a percentage according to the amount of times your ad was clicked divided by the amount of times it is shown.
Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR.
Example: 50 clicks and 1000 impressions = CTR 5%.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is the amount of times your website was visited by someone directly typing in your URL into the address bar or through a bookmark. Having a high amount of direct traffic shows how many people are aware of your company and your website address.
Entry Page
The page that your visitor first appeared on.
Events
Events are the amount of times a user clicks on some form of interactive content within your website such as downloads, video plays, link clicks and form submissions.
Exit Page – Exit Rate (% Exit)
The page that a visitor leaves your website on. If there seems to be a trend of many visitors leaving on a certain page then there may be an issue with that page, losing the audience’s attention.
Impression
An impression is each time your advertisement shows up on Google and is viewed by a user, whether any action is took or not.
Hits
Any interaction that results in data being sent to Google Analytics.
Landing Page
The page which your visitor first uses. This is generally the home page due to being the main page on Google search results, if the landing page is different it is an indicator into audience trends and this will need to be addressed.
Organic Traffic
The amount of visitors that have gone onto your website through naturally discovering your page and from unpaid tactics.
Paid Traffic
The amount of users that have visited your page from a paid method. This includes advertising and by paying to have your website on Google search results.
Page views: Unique Page Views
Page views are the amount of times that your page has been visited overall. If your page is visited numerous times by a single user it will class as multiple page visits.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is the amount of users that have visited your website through a link from another website. Most commonly this is through social media links from your business profile and websites that reference your blog posts.
Returning Visitors
Users that have been on the website previously. If they clear their cookies or have these disabled, Analytics will not be able to record the user as a returning visitor.
Sessions
A session is the whole user experience that a visitor has on your website within a time frame. A single session includes different page visits, events and interactions. By default, a session lasts until 30 minutes after no further activity. If a user visits after this timeframe then a new session will be activated.
Time on Page
The amount of time that a user spends on a certain web page.
Users
The amount of times a single person has visited your website; a user could have multiple visits to your website but this will still be counted as a single user.
% Exit
This is the percentage of exits to your specific webpage, this shows how many of overall visitors of the page leave compared to those who view.
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