How to Understand Google Analytics Terms

Digital marketers have a lot of analytics terms they use in relation to their businesses. It is imperative to get a hold on these terms and to use them appropriately since analytics tools base their measurements/metrics on these terms. 

Here are some common terms you can measure using Google Analytics.

Keywords: Digital marketing relies on keywords as search terms to aid web users. These users find businesses if they use their keywords to search for products/services. Google analytics helps to identify and provide these keywords. Search engines use these keywords to improve the search engine rankings of websites.

Conversion Rate: Many web users habitually visit many websites. Of this lot, the percentage of visitors who do what you expect them to do on your website is regarded as “converted.” Such activities may include making a purchase or registering to download a free e-book, get a discount coupon, download how-to video or signing up for email newsletter.

Visit: This is any session in which a visitor interacts with your website irrespective of whether they do anything on your website or simply move on to another site.

Unique Visitors: This refers to the number of web users who visit your website within a specified time period. Irrespective of the number of times same person visits the site within that time period, the visitor still counts as one unique visitor.

Average Time on Site: This is the average time measured in seconds or minutes a user spends on your website.

Exit Page: This is the last page of your website that a visitor views before leaving your site. Knowing the last page your visitors visit before leaving your website can give you a lot of marketing insights into what works and what doesn’t on your website.

Traffic Sources: This refers to places sending the most traffic to your website. It could be referral sites, social media sites, search engines and traffic exchanges.

Referral Sites: These are sites where people come to your site by clicking on your link on the sites. If your website gets a lot of referral site traffic, it is an indication that your online presence is strong on those other sites.

Search Engines Traffic: This is the same thing as organic traffic. It refers to people who visit your site because it showed up in their search results. A measurement of your search engine traffic gives information on how effective your SEO is.

Page Views: Any time a web user views a page of your site, it counts as a page view. One visit may contain many page views depending on how long the visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit.

New Visitors: This represents web visitors who are coming to your website for the very first time. The information is vital because marketers need different strategies to market to new visitors as against repeat/returning visitors.

Returning Visitors: Returning visitors are visitors who make a comeback to your website for one reason or another. Some of such reasons may include to get more information, make inquiries and even to make a repeat purchase.

Bounce Rate: This refers to the number of users who exit your website after only viewing just one page. The higher the bounce rate, the less the time visitors spend on your website.

Pages per Visit: This refers to how many pages users view on your website per each visit. The more pages they visit, the better your website engagement.

Direct Traffic: These are people who access your business by typing your URL directly in the address bar of their browsers. Direct traffic is a very good indication of your web authority and customer awareness. It also indicates how effective your marketing ads are.