Now, once the Google Analytics account has been set up , let’s
look the most basic statistics which we are primarily interested in i.e. the traffic
coming to our blog/Web site.
Since we have just set up our Google Analytics account I will
give you some basic definitions of all the terms used above.
Visits / Session :
This count represents the times your blog / website was visited by an
individual. Though the definition seems pretty straight forward, there is much
more to understand in it.
The Visit is recorded any time you visit the blog or website.
Now, for instance, you visited using Mozilla and you are viewing it. Again, you
visited the same site from chrome while your initial session of Mozilla is
still Active, GA will calculate it as two visits than one. I will explain Visits in further depth when I will
write about cookies. Because before understanding cookies used by GA, it’s somewhat
confusing to really get the concept of Visits right. So for now let’s assume
that the number of times the site is being visited comes under Visits.
Unique Visitors: This count represents how many individuals
actually visited your website/Blog. Now keep in mind if a person visits a blog
on Monday and again on Tuesday the counter won’t increase to 2, his initial
visit will only be considered. Here also we should keep in mind that it’s
actually browser related . Means if you initially visit a blog from Internet Explorer
on Monday and from Mozilla on Tuesday the unique visitor count will become 2
rather than one. Because it will check from which browser you are visiting and it
will consider you as a separate individual.
Pageviews: Pageviews as the name itself suggest, is the
number of pages people have viewed during their
visit to your website.
Pages/Visit : Pages/visit
is actually the average pages viewed by people during their visit to your web site/Blog.
For example, during one visit a person viewed 10 pages and in his next visit he
viewed 8 pages the pages/visit becomes 9 for him. Likewise, its calculated for every
person visited your website and the overall average is represented in the
report.
Avg. Visit Duration: Avg.
Visit Duration is nothing but average time people spent on your website. It is
calculated in the same way as Pages/Visit.
Bounce Rate: This
is one of the most important parameters to watch out if you are seriously
thinking of improving your Website / Blog. Bounce Rate is actually the rate at
which people visit your website and exit viewing only the home page without
navigating any further in the website. Now if this rate is higher, it can be a
point of concern for people who seriously want people to visit their website
/Blog. There are many reasons why this rate might be High. Like your Web site
might have Just one page or your website or Blog has flash applications because
of which people normally watch them and exit. In Case of such scenario you can
very well set event tracking to get data about visitor flow. I will explain how
event tracking can be done in some later posts.
%New Visits: This parameter is also an important
parameter to watch out for. %New Visits tells us,out of the total people
visiting our Web site or Blog , how many are new and visiting for the first
time.Now this can both good or Bad. Let’s take my blog’s example, here I have
total visits as 124 and %New visits is 67.74%, which indirectly means out of
124 people 84 people have visited my website for the first time and rest 40 people
are my returning visitors. Now, since my blog is quite new, this percentage can
be considered as positive. But if you are out there for a long time, and you
have %New visits as high it can very well mean that though new people are continuously
visiting your website, you are somehow failing to retain them.
Reference:
Kaushik, A. (2007, August 23). http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-standards-26-new-metrics-definitions/. Retrieved from www.kaushik.net: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-standards-26-new-metrics-definitions/
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