A beginner’s terms and definitions of words used in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a fantastic free web analytic tool for measuring traffic and the behavior of the traffic/visitors of your site.
You can then derive meaning out of your data, report back accurate ROI to your bosses and help you justify further improvements or strategies using Google analytics.
Best of all it’s completely free tool. However, when you open up Google Analytics for the first time, it’s very easy to be intimidated by its vast array of menus, navigation, graphs, visualizations and language.
I have recently launched Google Analytics Training Course and when teaching google analytics I found some basic key terms which I would like to share with you too.
Read more: A Brief Guide to Google AdSense
Here I’ll offer a quick overview of the language involved when studying Google Analytics, which should help clear a few things up, before pointing you towards further resources on the site for more expansive guidance.
Quick A-Z List of Basic Terms
Here are a few of the more common words you’ll come across in analytics.
- Bounce: the user’s activity on your site just involved the loading of a single page.
- Conversion: refers to an activity carried out by the user which fulfills the intended web page purpose (product purchase, download, newsletter subscription etc.)
- Entrances: the number of times visitors entered your site through a specified page or set of pages.
- Entry (or Landing) Page: the entry page is the first page viewed by a website visitor.
- Exit Point: the exit point is the last page viewed by a website visitor
- Page Impression: a page is loaded or reloaded by a user.
- Sessions: the activity by a unique user in one visit to your site.
- Visits: the total number of visits to your site, from unique or repeat visitors.
- Unique Visitors: the number of unique visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.
To make things clearer, let’s take a look at how this information is relayed in Google Analytics.
Audience Overview
This is the first page you’ll see when you fire up Google Analytics Report. We have included all the 7 key metrics reported here on first report screen of Google analytics dashboard.
- Sessions: the activity by a unique user in one visit to your site
- Users: the total number of distinct devices that have accessed your site*
- Pageviews: the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted
- Pages/Session: the average number of pages viewed during a visit to your site.
- Avg. Session Duration: the average duration time of a session
- Bounce Rate: the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the visitor left your site from the entrance page)
- % New Sessions: the percentage of visits that were first-time visits (from people who had never visited your site before)
We provide digital marketing training as well as google analytics training you can check all module and course detail here at Google Analytics Course
