What Do Your Web Analytic Reports Mean?
Your web analytic reports are a valuable tool for understanding how your website is resonating with visitors. But if you’re not familiar with the terminology, these reports can be a little difficult to interpret at first.
Don’t worry. Web analytics is a lot simpler to understand once you know what the terms mean, and we’re happy to walk you through it if you have questions.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the most important information in your report and why it’s useful.
The purpose of web analytics
On the most basic level, your web analytic reports tell you who’s visiting your website and what they do when they get there. This insight is extremely valuable for understanding the traffic that’s coming to your site and whether your site is performing as you expect.
On a more advanced level, your analytics can help you set specific marketing and sales goals, tracking nearly any user action on your site. This data can be used to develop effective sales funnels, digital advertising campaigns, and other business strategies.
But let’s stick to the basics for now and go over some of the key terms in your report.
What do the terms mean?
To understand your web analytics report, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with these terms (or “metrics” as we sometimes refer to them):
- Unique visitors: A unique visitor is a new person that visits your site. Google Analytics refers to these visitors as “users.” They signify someone who has not visited your website recently or ever before, as tracked by analytics cookies stored in the user’s browser. This metric is typically more valuable than your “total visitors,” which counts repeat visits from the same users. For example, if John and Ellen visit your site for the first time, those are 2 unique visitors. If they both visit your site 2 times in a given period, then that would be 4 total visitors.
- Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that took no further action after they arrived at your site. They didn’t visit any other pages – they simply left. So a bounce rate of 99% would mean 99% of visitors left your site as soon as they arrived. (That’s a good sign something is seriously wrong with your website.)
- Session duration: Session duration tells you how long your visitors stayed on the site before leaving. Typically, the longer the session, the more value your visitors are getting from the site.
- Behavior flow and drop-offs: Behavior flow shows you which pages users are visiting after coming to your site and what they do next. This metric is also useful for seeing where visitors are dropping off the site (which pages make them leave the site).
- Visitor acquisition: This metric tells you how visitors came to your site. Typically, it’s broken down by the following types: 1) Organic – from search engines; 2) Direct – by entering your website domain directly into the browser; 3) Paid search – from paid ad campaigns such as Google Ads; 4) Referral – from links on other websites
What can you do with this information?
The terms above are only a short list of the many metrics you can measure on your website. But the important next step is to use those analytics to make improvements on your site. By identifying the pages or goals where your site is falling short, you can begin making critical optimizations to help convert those users into leads and sales.
Need a hand?
Contact us at Sullivan Design if you have any questions about your web analytics or need help making improvements to your site.
