Google Analytics. Google Analytics Glossary of terms

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1 Google Analytics Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures set goals. Google Analytics isn't a magical solution which you can just plug into your website in order to fix it. It is just a tool, which makes our work much easier to do. Google Analytics tells us what is happening, whereas user testing, focus groups and questionnaires tell us why it's happening. Armed with this knowledge of the 'what' and 'why', we can begin to tackle website issues and problems. Google Analytics Glossary of terms Pageviews - Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted. Unique pageviews - Unique Pageviews is the number of visits during which the specified page was viewed at least once. Average time on page - Avg. Time on Page is the average amount of time that visitors spent viewing a specified page or set of pages. Entrances - Entrances is the number of times visitors entered your site through a specified page or set of pages. Bounce rate - Bounce Rate is the percentage of single- page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Exit percentage - Exit is the percentage of site exits that occurred from a specified page or set of pages. Understanding Your Reports - The Basics Dashboard Home Clicking the Home tab near the top of the page will bring you to the dashboard. The dashboard gives you a basic summary of your results, including daily visits, average time on site, and traffic types. Clicking on the small report icon in the top right corner of each of the graphs and tables will take you to a more detailed report of each.

2 Date Range Once you are in your reports you can change the date range of the reports to the specific dates you want to see. This is very helpful for comparing data from month- to- month, week- to- week, etc. You can do this on the top right of the report screens. As shown by the yellow arrow. Standard Reporting Audience Overview When you first login to your Analytics reports, this is the first page you will see. The Audience section includes the behaviours, demographics and technologies of your visitors. You can click on the links in the side navigation to drill down to more detailed information for each area. Some important areas to analyse on the Audience Dashboard include:

3 How many pages are viewed each visit Knowing how many pages are viewed at each visit in combination with other metrics can be a good analysis tool. This does not apply in some cases, e.g. metrics on blog sites, as visitors commonly visit only one page on your site. How long visitors stayed on your pages If you see that a visitor did not spend a lot of time on the site, but has viewed many pages, it is possible that the visitor could not find what they were looking for. If you notice that a visitor spent a good amount of time on the site and viewed only a few pages, it is possible that the visitor found what they were looking for quite easily and spent the time to get the information they wanted If your site is large and you have many navigation/landing pages, time can be low for these pages. What type of content are they displaying? If it s a contact page or stats/table, people may only need the page for a second or two. In which case low times are good. New vs. Returning Visitors This is a basic metric that gives insight into whether you are getting unique visitors or repeat visitors. The Behaviour > New vs. Returning Report on the left- hand side allows you to go more in depth. This metric, like others, is to be used in combination with other metrics. This can be used to determine how many new visitors are coming to your pages. On the other hand it also helps determine how many visitors are returning. Traffic Sources Overview

4 The Traffic Sources section indicates how visitors found your pages. In this section you re able to evaluate & compare the effectiveness of your search, referral, direct & campaign traffic. A more detailed report of each traffic source can be found on the left side of the page, under the overview section. Use each report to evaluate visitor engagement, including average time on site, bounce rate, & pages per visit. Compare conversion & Ecommerce effectiveness of each traffic source by analysing goal & Ecommerce conversion rates, per visit goal values & revenue. If you have a high percent of new visits, you may want to think about making your pages more engaging to help bring more visitors back. This metric should be compared with other metrics to determine a course of action. If you have a low percent of new visits, your visitors are showing loyalty by returning, but you may not be attracting new visitors. Comparing this metric with your overall traffic may offer valuable insight. The Behaviour reports allow you to learn even more about your visitors. Here you can see how many times each visitor returns, how recently visitors returned for an additional visit, how many page views, and the length of visits.

5 Determining whether traffic is good or quality traffic The Traffic Sources reports can be used to helps you make decisions about where to focus your advertising and site- optimization efforts. The following metrics can be used as good determinates for qualified traffic: Bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your pages where the visitor leaves after viewing only one page. Bounce rate is a good indicator of quality traffic except in a few cases like if your site is a Blog. In cases like this, it is very common for visitors to only view one page and leave. Regardless of how long they look at the page, the bounce rate would still be high. You can look at the bounce rate of referring sites or keywords and determine whether the traffic coming from these sources is qualified traffic. A high bounce rate may indicate that the site was not what the visitor was looking for. You may want to adjust your keywords or campaigns in this case. What is considered a "high bounce rate" is determined on a site- to- site basis. It is important to understand your visitors and determine a benchmark bounce rate to go off of. Assess the nature of your pages and whether it makes sense for users to visit more than one page or not.

6 Time on site can also be a good indicator of what traffic is qualified. If a visitor is not spending a lot of time on the site, it may indicate that the visitor is not seeing what they are looking for. Based on Time on Site numbers, you may want to consider possible plans of action, including: Making your pages more user- friendly, so it is easier for the visitor to find what they are looking for. Making your pages more appealing, so the visitor spends more time on the site. It may be useful to take a look at the following pages on the Keele site to get a brief understanding of how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) works and what we can do to improve our presence.