Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools a company or organization can use to gather important marketing data. But once you finally get through the headache of getting your Google Analytics profile set up, it can be tough to decipher what all that data actually means. We are going to walk you through what each term means, how to interpret it, and how to use it to make smart marketing decisions.

Google Analytics Important Metrics Defined from A – Z

Google Analytics can give you much more data than just counting how many people are visiting your site. When used correctly, it can be a key tool for creating effective digital marketing campaigns. Below are definitions to help you understand the metrics categories, as well as some tips and considerations for using Google Analytics. This is not a complete list, but it is a comprehensive look into the most important metrics.

Acquisition

Acquisition tells you where your traffic is coming from, such as search engines, social networks, or website referrals. It’s important to know how people are making their way to your site so that you can improve your strategy for those channels.

Consider this –  What channel has the highest conversion rate?  Setting up goals in your Google Analytics account will help you determine what channel of traffic is giving you the highest return on investment (ROI). Once you know where you are getting the best ROI, you can shift resources towards that channel.

Average Session Duration

Average Session Duration is more complicated than just measuring the average time a visitor spends on your site. The time on site is calculated as the time between a visitor’s first page request, and their last. There are a couple things to consider when analyzing this number. If a user visits multiple pages, the time they spend on the last page they visit isn’t recorded into their ASD. The ASD will only calculate their session ending with the last page opening. There’s one more catch, if a visitor only visits one page, their average ASD is 0 because only one page request was made. If a page is left open, the Google Analytics preset will calculate the end of a session after 30 minutes of inactivity (you can adjust this time to your preferences).

Consider this –  If visitors spend more time on my site are they more likely to convert?  If your ASD is low, this may indicate that your site is difficult to navigate; however, this metric is not a tell-all on how your site is performing. A high ASD doesn’t necessarily mean good engagement, it could mean a visitor feels lost or confused about where to find something on your site. Therefore, it’s important to look at the bigger picture. This metric is helpful when considering segmented views and traffic channels. When considering ASD, it’s important to analyze it along with other engagement metrics. Measuring your ASD alongside your conversion metrics will help you gain a better understanding of how a converting visitor typically behaves before converting.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking allows you to compare the performance of your website to the combined data of your industry peers. This metric shows you how your site is performing in relation to the websites of your competitors. There are over 1600 industry categories to choose from when selecting your benchmarks, and from there are you are able to further refine your data by size and location. You can even set benchmarks against your own data from previous months or years, to get a clear visual of growth and decline.

Consider this- Are traffic fluctuations a direct result of my business decisions, or are they a broader industry trend?  If you launch a new mobile-friendly website design, and immediately see a rise in mobile traffic, benchmarking can show you if the increase in mobile traffic is a direct result of the new design, or simply a coincidental industry trend. Benchmarking provides context for your data, gives insight on industry trends, and can help you set meaningful goals for your website.

Bounce Rate

A Bounce Rate is, “the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page”, as defined by Google Analytics. The goal is to keep this number as low as possible. Typically, the longer someone stays on your site the more likely they are to convert.

Consider this – If people are landing and immediately leaving how can I figure out what is causing them to bounce? If you have multiple pages full of what you think is great content, people should not be bouncing off of it immediately. If you are seeing a bounce rate above 50% consider using Google Analytics Content Experiments. This function allows you to test different versions of a page and measure the bounce rate. This can show you if a different version of the same page will improve your bounce rate and lead to more conversions.

Branded Traffic

Strong brand awareness is very important for any company. Branded traffic is the number of visitors who come to your site by searching for your brand name specifically. Branded traffic is intentioned traffic-  these are the visitors who know you, know your brand, and specifically type your brand name into a search engine.

Consider this: Is my brand memorable?  Branded traffic is a good indicator of how memorable your brand is, and how well you market your business. You want visitors to remember you, and to seek you out when they’re in need of your services/products. If your branded traffic is low, and the vast majority of your visitors are stumbling onto your website via a non-branded searches, you should focus your efforts on creating a more focused marketing strategy. When brand awareness increases, so should conversions and website visits. You can find your branded traffic in Google Analytics by clicking on Acquisition> Campaigns> Organic Keywords.

Channels

In Google Analytics, A Channel refers to a high level category that groups together traffic sources with the same medium. Channels give you an easy-to-understand top level look at where your traffic is coming from. For example, traffic sources from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn would all be grouped under the Social Channel.

There are two varieties of Channels: Default Channels, and Customizable Channels. Default Marketing Channels are automatically put in place by Google Analytics. These are the Channels that Google deems as globally relevant measures of site performance. Customizable Marketing Channels are user-defined, and you can set these up to measure specific metrics that you think are relevant for your business. Optimize Smart has great step-by-step instructions on how you can edit Default Channels, and set up your own Customizable Channels.

Consider this: How can I focus my resources to optimize the Channels that are working for me? What do I need to change about the Channels that aren’t?  If you’re putting hours into social media for your business, but you see that a low number of people are visiting your website through the Social Channel, you may need to refocus your resources toward a Channel that’s yielding a higher return, or rethink your social media strategy to optimize your Social Channel.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the amount of clicks on your site following a search. This metric shows how well your site is performing on indexed search results. A low CTR may indicate that your site has poor keyword targeting, irrelevant content for the targeted search, or boring or uninformative snippets, leading people to avoid clicking on your site when displayed alongside other search results.

Consider this: Am I setting up my SEO to draw in the right customers?  For most websites, the majority of site traffic will be un-branded traffic, people who are searching for a specific item or service. If you are misrepresenting your business by establishing the wrong site keywords, your site won’t appear relevant to people who search for those keywords, resulting in a low CTR. In addition, if your SEO titles and/or meta descriptions are non descriptive or uninteresting, this may discourage visitors from clicking on your search snippet, which will result in a low CTR. Optimizing your keywords, SEO titles, and meta descriptions should drive users to click on your site out of the results of a search engine, and improve your CTR.

Conversion – See Goals Below

A Conversion is the measurement of the performance of a desired outcome. When a customer is converted, it means that they completed a goal you set up on your website. Think of it this way: A Conversion is whatever action needs to happen to convert a visitor into a customer. For example, for an online retail website, this number might represent how many visits resulted in a sale.

Consider this: How can I make my website do the selling for me?  If people land on your site and don’t do what you want them to, then something needs to change. While industry standards differ (see: Benchmarks), if your site has a Conversion rate that is under 2%, this may indicate issues with your site set up, site copy, or site accessibility. It’s important to have a clear call to action, and an easy-to-navigate site. Low-quality content or a buggy website may also cause your Conversion rate to suffer.

Demographics

This term is the same in digital marketing as it is in the traditional sense. A demographic is a grouping characteristic that can help you categorize and understand your visitors. Knowing the demographics of your visitors can help you understand more about your audience. For example, understanding the location dimension can help you see from where in the world people are most often accessing your website. Knowing the average age of your site visitors can help you craft a marketing campaign to best appeal to that audience.

Consider this – Do you REALLY know who your customer is?  Of course you are going to have a good idea of who your core customer is, but you might be surprised by your detailed demographic data. Plus, Google Analytics has the capacity to identify more than just traditional demographics, and can give you very granular data about the people that visit your page. While it identifies typical demographics such as age, race, and gender, it also shows you trends in time of site visit, household income, location, language, interests, and much more. Understanding your demographics allows you to create a dynamic brand message, catered specifically to your audience.

Dimensions

Dimensions are attributes of your visitors, and the activities they perform on your website. Understanding the Dimensions metric can answer questions you might have about your audience such as age, gender, location, the keyword they used to find your site, if a user accessed your site via web browser or mobile phone, or the type of browser they used to access your site. Dimensions also refer to actions, such as the number of clicks a user performed, pages they visited, and videos they watched.

Think of your dimensions as a way to sort your data by demographic and action. You can view any applicable Google Analytics metric in the context of Dimensions to help you understand not only your user demographics, but also their actions on your site.  

Consider this – What pages or videos do I have on my site that are leading people to convert?  By setting your site Dimensions, you are able to cross examine your visitors and create Dimension combinations to understand important performance factors. An example application of this is setting up your Dimensions to calculate the relationship between the number of conversions and views of a specific video on your site.  If you find that viewing the video is highly correlated with conversions,  you may want to rearrange your site to feature that video on the homepage.

Engagement Rate

Google Analytics is a great tool to help you see how engaged your users are. User engagement should be defined by taking a few metrics into consideration. Each metric will be discussed briefly in this category, only to show how they pertain to user engagement. If you are unclear what each metric means, you can read more about them by scrolling to find their dedicated category on this blog, or by vising the Google Analytics Help Center.

• Audience Engagement Rate – This number shows you a detailed chart of how many people stayed on your site for different time intervals. If you find that the vast majority of people are leaving between 0-10 seconds, this shows low engagement.

• Average Pages per Visit – Typically, the more pages a visitor explores on your website, the more likely they are to convert. As a rule of thumb, you want this number to be high.

• Bounce Rate – A high Bounce Rate shows low website engagement because visitors choose to leave your website quickly rather than spending time exploring it.

• Days Since Last Session – This tells you how often people visit your site. If most of your visitors haven’t been to your page in a while, you may want to try posting new content to give visitors a reason to return.

• Frequency of Visits – This is a detailed look at what percentage of your visitors visit once, twice, three times etc. over any given timeframe. If you have high Frequency of Visits, this shows high engagement.

• Percentage of Returning Visitors – A high Percentage of Returning Visitors means you are doing something right. If a visitor comes to your site and decides to revisit it, this shows that your content is engaging, and that visitor is remembering your brand.

• Time on Site – Low Time on Site usually indicates that your content is not engaging, your website is difficult to navigate, or you are misrepresenting your website.  

Exit Rate

There are two parts to this metric. First off, to calculate the exit rate, you must first know the number of Exits. ‘Exits’ refers to the number of people that exit your site. This number will be the same as the ‘Entrances’ metric because anyone who comes to your website eventually has to leave it. The Exit Rate is calculated by taking the number of exits divided by the number of pageviews on your site. When people visit more than one page while visiting your site, the Exit Rate percentage will decrease, signifying higher overall engagement.

Confused? The More Visibility blog gives a great breakdown of the relationship between Entrances, Bounces, and Exits.

Frequency

The Frequency metric measures how frequently a user visits your site within a certain timeframe. This number shows the degree to which users are attracted to your website, and how well you are encouraging first time visitors to return to your site. High website frequency can be good or bad depending on your goals. High visitor frequency can show strong customer loyalty.

Consider this: Are visitors with high visitor frequency more likely to convert?  If people are typically visiting your site 10 times within a specific timeframe on average, have they converted? Consider this in association with your Conversion metric. You can also use this metric in reverse by examining the behavior of visitors that do convert and adjusting your dimensions to see how many times they visited your site before converting. Knowing these behavior patterns can help you creating custom marketing campaigns to appeal to your visitors and improve your conversion rate.

Goals

A Goal is exactly as it sounds! In Google Analytics you can track Goals, which are often called conversions. This is probably the best use of Google Analytics metrics because it can tell you exactly how well your website is performing based on the outcomes that you identified as most important to you.

Consider this – How do I measure my success if I don’t first set a goal? Use goals to track your business objectives and to solidify what success looks like to your company. Check out this great blog by Kissmetrics on how to set up goals in Google Analytics to get started.

Impression

The simple explanation of an impression is that an impression is counted each time your website link URL is shown as an option of a search query. This is not to say that if your site is listed on the billionth page of a search engine, that it will automatically count as an impression. An impression is only counted when the page containing your website link URL is opened. So if your page ranks on the second page of a google search, an impression will be counted every time someone clicks to view the second page.

Consider this: Do I make people want to click on my site? If your SEO Title is boring or cut off, or if you have a poorly worded meta description, it may cause your website to appear sloppy to a person skimming search results. It’s important to have SEO titles that are accurate to your brand and descriptive in order to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Keywords

This term is a little misleading. It would be more accurate to call this metric “Key Phrases.”  Keywords are the phrases that visitors use to find your website through a search engine. Knowing what keywords your visitors are using when they search will give you a snapshot of what people are actually looking for when they find you.

Landing Page

Also known as a Entrance page, the Landing Page is the page that visitors land on when they first visit your site. Your Landing Page should tell your visitor what you do, and what you want them to do. This can be achieved by designing a website with a sleek design, strong branding,  conscice copy, and a clear call to action.

Consider this: What’s your value proposition?  Who is your target audience? Why do they need you? What makes you better than your competition? What action do you want them to take? Clearly communicate the answers to these questions in an effective way on your Landing Page to drive conversion. For more tips on optimizing your Landing Page, check out this blog by Unbounce.

Loyalty

Gauging customer loyalty, strictly based off of the metrics you collect when a visitor lands on your site, can be a tough feat. Tough, but not impossible. When measuring customer loyalty, you first have to decide what that means to your brand. For now, here are a few metrics that can give you insight about your customer loyalty. Each metric will be discussed briefly in this category, only to show how they pertain to loyalty. If you are unclear what each metric means, you can read more about them by scrolling to find their dedicated category on this blog, or by visiting the Google Analytics Help Center.

• Percentage of Return Visitors – Keeping this percentage high and tracking it long term can indicate customer loyalty. However, this number can be misleading because it is a percentage measurement. Therefore, if the number of total visitors increases, the Percentage of Return Visitors may decrease even if the total number of return visitors doesn’t change, or if it increases at a lesser rate. When considering Percentage of Return Visitors, it’s important to take these and other engagement factors (such as number of New Sessions) into consideration.

• Visitor Frequency – Visitor Frequency identifies how often a visitor comes to your site. For companies that offer a service that is needed often and requires a website visit (like a discount clothing website), a high Visitor Frequency indicates high customer loyalty. For companies that sell big ticket items, don’t sell anything at all, or for a brand that has a website but primarily does business in-store, this number isn’t a conclusive indicator of brand loyalty.

Consider this – Is customer loyalty important to your brand?  If visitors don’t return often to your site, It might be time to put a strategy in place to provide regular content updates to the website through a blog or other content marketing channel such as ebooks and whitepapers.

Parameters

Parameters are little tags that go at the end of your URLs to help you track more effectively. When your link is clicked, the Parameters send tags back to Google Analytics to help you track the traffic originating from that URL.

Consider this – Where is your traffic coming from?  By adding parameters to a website URL in a campaign, you are able to track how much traffic came to your site through a visitor clicking that specific link.  If you launch an email marketing campaign and see an uptick in business, you can’t doubtlessly attribute that extra business to the marketing campaign. You can set Parameters to track how much site traffic you’re receiving from each link in your marketing campaign, thereby gauging the effectiveness of that campaign.

Queries

Queries tell you exactly what someone typed into their favorite search engine to find their way to your site.

Consider this – In addition to your branded key phrases, how are you ranking on the phrases you think should perform well for your site?  When it comes to creating website content, it’s important to create content that is focused and detailed  in order to bring more organic searches to your site.

Sessions and New Sessions

A Session is a single visit to the site. One Session encompasses all the actions a user made while visiting your site. A Session must end before another Session can begin. The same person can visit the site multiple times per day and each visit is recorded as a new Session.

A New Session begins in the case of the following events:

• When a visitor first lands opens the site.
• When a user is inactive for 30 minutes (automatic Session expiration time frame) then resumes activity on the site.
• One session spans before and after midnight. At midnight, a New Session begins.
• A user leaves then returns to the site.

New Sessions are a good indicator of how much repeat traffic you are getting.

Social Traffic

This section will show you which of your social networks are bringing you traffic, and which aren’t performing well. Social Traffic may include traffic from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The Social Channel will give you a top level look at how well your Social is performing, and clicking through will give you a more detailed understanding about what channels are and aren’t performing.

Consider this – What is your ROI on each network?  Don’t waste a lot of time nurturing a certain social channel if it isn’t consistently bringing in traffic. Think about how you can rework your social media strategy to prompt engagement (i.e. people clicking, liking, and sharing). In order to measure engagement, you will need to set up Social Traffic goals and track conversions.

Traffic Source – Direct 

Direct Navigation occurs when a user navigates to a website directly through the browser address bar. For Direct Navigation to occur, a visitor must type your website URL into the browser.

Consider this – Is there a high percentage of people going directly to my site, or are they coming to it through another channel? If a high amount of direct traffic is observed, I recommend reading this blog post on Megalytics, Understanding Direct Traffic in Google Analytics, for tips to help you clean up your Direct Traffic metric. It’s unusual user behavior to type in a URL directly, it is far more likely that they will utilize a search engine. If Google Analytics cannot determine the source of traffic, they’ll typically attribute it to direct traffic.

Traffic Source – Organic 

The Organic Traffic metric tells you how much traffic is coming from unpaid search results. Wanting to optimize for Organic Traffic is another reason many companies decide to invest in SEO.

Consider this: Am I doing everything I can to make my brand known? Creating quality web content and optimizing it for SEO, backlinking to the site from other sites (through affiliate marketing, etc.), and boosting keywords all work together to optimize Organic Traffic.  

Traffic Source – Referral Traffic

Referral Traffic happens when a visitor comes to your site through a channel other than a search engine. Referral Traffic occurs when someone clicks on a hyperlink from another site, a link in an email, or a promotional link on an ad. A good example of Referral Traffic is when someone quotes your blog post in another blog post.

Consider this –If you don’t see a lot of referral traffic, consider investing time in healthy backlinks, guest blogging, and affiliate marketing. Referral traffic is a great way to boost  your search ranking with search engines. It helps you target very specific audiences with the support of whatever site you are linked to.

Unique Page Views and Page Views

These metrics are interrelated. A page view is a single viewing of a page on your site. Anytime a page is loaded, it is counted.

A Unique Page View is how many Page Views are generated by the same user during the same session. A Unique Page View will not record a page more than once if viewed by the same visitor.  

Unique Visitors and Visits

A unique visitor is a measure of individuals that visit your website. A visit (sometimes called a session) is when someone visits your website, regardless of how often that individual has visited. Both metrics are important, but if you are looking to use metrics to take marketing action, visits are usually the more important metric. Plus, measuring the number of visits month to month gives you the big picture on how well your site is performing.

Consider this – How many visits does it take for the average unique visitor to convert a customer? Knowing the average time spent on your site before making a purchase helps you determine what is involved in making the decision to purchase. Do you know how stable your sales cycle is? Does it fluctuate depending on product or season? Know how your website fluctuates and optimize for it. This metric is important for ecommerce and lead generation.  To track this metric for ecommerce, use this FAQ from Google Analytics on how to setup ecommerce reporting.

Google Analytics Reporting Terms

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool with a complicated interface that is not set up with a beginner in mind. There are people who dedicate their entire careers to analyzing and interpreting the data from Google Analytics. Although this was a comprehensive list of some of the most usable metrics available in Google Analytics, it only scratches the surface of what Google Analytics is capable of defining, and there are many more terms and metrics we didn’t cover in this guide. To learn how to design your Google Analytics dashboard to work for your business, and to get more help understanding Google Analytics metrics, check out the Google Analytics Help Center. You can also view their video tutorials on the Google Analytics YouTube. If you are ready to take the next step in your business and hire a professional, talk to one of us here at Fujisan Marketing.