Once you sow your business, you must keep a constant eye to grow healthy roots, stem, branches and eventually flowers. A similar line of reasoning runs on the growth of your business website. It needs constant nourishment and care.
A plant shows signs of growth by size and greenness. But your website will not illustrate its success/failure through such apparent physical traits. You need to understand numbers and metrics to track the health of your website through web analytics.
The language in the wordbook of web analytics is tricky and thorny. Monitoring your website’s analytics can prove to be a challenging task. We will make it simple for you by breaking down the most important web analytics terms into simple words. Read on.
One free tool to monitor your web analytics is Google Analytics, which gives you a truckful of data related to your traffic acquisition, user behavior and conversion.
1) Users
The number of users in web analytics denotes the number of unique visitors your website has had. You can view the number of visitors each day, each week, each month or you also can define a custom time period.
2) New Users
The total number of first-time visitors to your website will be logged under new users in web analytics.
3) Sessions
Sessions in web analytics mean the number of visits irrespective of return visits.
User Case
Girl ‘A’ visits your website at 8 AM.
Girl ‘B’ visits your website at 2 PM.
Girl ‘A’ visits your website again at 5 PM.
Regarding the above case,
Users = 2
Sessions = 3
4) Bounce Rate
According to web analytics, bounce rate is the percentage of your website visitors who leave the page they entered through without viewing other pages.
If you visit the mall, enter one store and leave the mall without having a look at the other stores, you will contribute to the bounce rate.
The lesser the bounce rate, the better your website is performing. The ideal bounce rate for websites differs from 20% to 90% according to the type of the website. E-commerce and retail websites must have low bounce rates but a higher percentage for news and blog portals is considered safe.
5) Session Duration
A session duration in web analytics is the time frame calculated from the times your user lands on your website till he/she leaves your website or the predetermined session time is complete (30 minutes on Google Analytics). In a nutshell, session duration is the average length of a session.
User Case
Girl ‘A’ lands on page A of your website at 10 AM
She navigates to page B at 10:05 AM
She leaves page B at 10:10 AM
Regarding the above case, the session duration is 10 minutes
6) Average Session Duration
The average of all session durations will be calculated and presented as the value of the average session duration.
7) Pages/Session
Another essential web analytics’ metrics, pages/sessions is the number of pages viewed on your website within one session that includes repeated views of the same webpage. More pages/session indicates that your website is engaging your visitors sufficiently.
User Case
A girl enters your website through page A.
After entering, she navigates to page B.
After a few seconds, she navigates to page C.
Finally, she returns to page A before exiting.
(Note – The above actions take place within the span of 30 minutes, i.e. one session)
Regarding the above case, the pages/session = 4 (A, B, C, A).
This is not all but some of the most important terms related to web analytics that you should know if you have a website. We do not want you to drown in data and forget it all. So take a break and read the blog that decodes the general web industry jargon.
Starting to monitor your web analytics can get overwhelming if you do not know what the numbers and metrics on these charts stand for. We recommend you sit down with a calm mind when you look at your web analytics. If your mind still feels hazy, come back and reread this blog post to brush up your understanding.
