Google Analytics

Google Analytics|web analytics|bounce rate|goals and funnels|visitors|pageview

For working in internet marketing on any other business on Internet we need to understand the web analytics (how to analyze the a web site) means about the performance of the site like traffic, user, location, time etc. 

Collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage of a site to grow the business is know as web analytics.

In past, on-site visitor measurement is called web analytics. But in present, there are two parts of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.

On-site web analytics- On-site web analytics refers to the measurement of a visitor's journey (activities) once on your website. This includes drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages motivate and attract people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial point of view. This data is mainly compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

Off-site web analytics - Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis of a website. It contains the measurement of a website's share of voice (visibility), potential audience (opportunity), and buzz (comments) on the Internet.

  

On-site web analytics technologies

There are many vendors and many software and services for on-site web analytics in market. All of them use two main technological approaches to collecting the data. 

1. Logfile analysis- This method  reads the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions.

2. Page tagging- This method uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser.

Both collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.

In addition other data sources may also be added to augment the data. For example; e-mail response rates, sales and lead information, direct mail campaign data, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as required.

Key definitions in Google analytics

Bounce Rate, Visit, Visitor, Hit, Click and Impression and many other

Hit

 A request for a file from the web server.

               OR

A hit is a request to a web server for a file (web page, image, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheet, etc.). When a web page is uploaded from a server the number of "hits" or "page hits" is equal to the number of files requested.

 A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity. It is available only in log analysis. It gives the idea popularity of a site, but this number is rough in visitors or page views.

Unique hits count

 It is the number of different individuals who have generated at least one hit.

 Impression

 An impression is each time an advertisement loads on a user's screen .We can say any time you see a banner , that is an impression.

OR

“When an advertisement loads on user’s screen .”

OR

The number of times people view an advertisement

OR

An impression is just when the Ad appears on a page and is viewed by a user.

 Click – Click refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another".

OR

“When a visitor click on a link/ad is called click”

OR

A click is just that, when a visitor actually clicks on the advert.

  Click Path- the sequence of hyperlinks one or more website visitors follows on a given site.

Page views ( for a site)-: Page Views is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a common measure of how much your site is used. It is more useful as a basic indicator of the traffic load on your site and server than as a marketing measure. 

 Page views (for a single page)- A request for a file whose type is defined as a page in log analysis. An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging . In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server.

OR

“No. of times a page was loaded”

OR

“No. of times a page was viewed”

Unique page View

A unique page view, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates page views that are generated by the same user during the same session.

Average Page views: Average Page Views is one way of measuring visit quality. A high Average Page Views number suggests that visitors interact extensively with your site. A high Average Page Views results from one or both of the following: 

Appropriately targeted traffic (i.e. visitors who are interested in what your site offers

High-quality content effectively presented on the site.

And a low average page views show that the traffic coming to the site has not been appropriately targeted to what the site offers or that the site does not deliver what was provided to the visitor. 

 Bounce--- It is a single page view; a single page view does not constitute a visit or a session.

OR

A bounce is when a visitor arrives on a page and immediately leaves.

OR

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur.

A visitor may bounce by:

• Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site

• Closing an open window or tab

• Typing a new URL

• Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site

• Session timeout

Bounce Rate:

Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site.

There are two principle ways of measuring bounce rate. The first is the number of visitors who only visit a single page in a website and leave. The assumption is that this page is the intended landing page, but not the final destination that the designer intended for the visitors. They came to the shop and browsed, but didn't buy. 

The second is the proportion of visitors who spend an extremely brief time on a page or at your site before leaving. These measures may have different meanings, and they may not always mean what we think they mean. Surveys and other methods of determining why visitors do what they do are not necessarily reliable because the sample of visitors who choose to respond to surveys is inherently biased. The non-cooperative ones just don't cooperate at all. 

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pagesare not relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

OR

Bounce rate is the percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. a measure of Web site quality.

OR

It is usually measured in two ways:

The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.

The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

OR

Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

OR

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. This is determined bythe session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

Rb=(Tv/Te)

where

Rb = Bounce rate

Tv = Total number of visitors viewing one page only

Te = Total entries to page

A visitor may bounce by:

Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site

Closing an open window or tab

Typing a new URL

Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site

Session timeout

A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. If a visitor views a page, doesn't look at another page, and leaves his or her browser idle for longer than 30 minutes, they will register as a bounce. If the visitor continues to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur.

Bounce Rate (for a single page)

The bounce rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the bounce rate for a web site is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a web site per session divided by the total number of web site visits.

Visits (Sessions)

 “No of unique sessions initiated by a user is called visits.”

OR

“A visit is the amount of time interaction between a browser and a website”. It must be less than or equal to 30mins. if more that will be counted as new visit. It is measured by session.

OR

Total time spent of a user on a site. It must be less than or equal to 30mins.if more that will be counted as new visit.

The number of visits received by your site is the most basic measure of how effectively you promote your site

OR

Visit / Session - A session is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes and no requests for pages from other domains intervening between page requests. A session ends when someone goes to another site, or 30 minutes elapse between page views, whichever comes first. A visit ends only after a 30 minute time delay. If someone leaves a site, then returns within 30 minutes, this will count as one visit but two sessions. Practically, most systems ignore sessions and many analysts use both terms for visits. Because time between page views is critical to the definition of visits and sessions, a single page view does not constitute a visit or a session (it is a "bounce").

 First Visit / First Session /New Visit - A visit from a visitor who has not made any previous visits .

  Visitor –Any Internet user who visits our site is called visitor that can be a human being or any automated software programmed. It is measured by cookies.

 Unique Visitor / Unique User –

“ In unique visitor report, a visitor is counted only once for a specific range of time.”

It is measured by cookies.

OR

The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging) within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor's computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors..

 Repeat Visitor - A visitor that has made at least one previous visit . The period between the last and current visit is called visitor regency and is measured in days.

 New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits . This definition creates a certain amount of confusion), and is sometimes substituted with analysis of first visits.

Singletons - The number of visits in which only a single page is viewed. It is indicative of various forms of Click fraud as well as being used to calculate bounce rate and in some cases to identify automatons bots.

% Exit - The percentage of users who exit from a page.

Visibility time - The time a single page (or a blog, Ad Banner...) is viewed.

 Session Duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site each time they visit. This metric can be complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view.

 Page View Duration / Time on Page - Average amount of time that visitor spend on each page of the site. As with Session Duration, this metric is complicated by the fact that analytics programs can not measure the length of the final page view unless they record a page close event, such as onUnload().

  Active Time / Engagement Time - Average amount of time that visitors spend actually interacting with content on a web page, based on mouse moves, clicks, hovers and scrolls. Unlike Session Duration and Page View Duration / Time on Page, this metric can accurately measure the length of engagement in the final page view.

  Page Depth / Page Views per Session - Page Depth is the average number of page views a visitor consumes before ending their session. It is calculated by dividing total number of page views by total number of sessions and is also called Page Views per Session or PV/Session.

  Frequency / Session per Unique - Frequency measures how often visitors come to a website. It is calculated by dividing the total number of sessions (or visits) by the total number of unique visitors. Sometimes it is used to measure theloyalty of your audience.

• Clicks vs. Visits

• Visits vs. Visitors vs. Absolute Unique Visitors

• Page Views vs. Unique Page Views

Clicks vs. Visits

There is an important distinction between clicks (such as in your AdWords Campaigns report) and visits (in your Search Engines and Visitors report). The clicks column in your reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by visitors, while visits indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your visitors. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match:

• A visitor may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, AdWords will record multiple clicks while Analytics recognises the separate page views as one visit. This is a common behaviour among visitors engaging in comparison shopping.

• A user may click on an ad and then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral information from the original visit will be retained in this case, so the one click will result in multiple visits.

• A visitor may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing th_ir browser's Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, AdWords will still register a click.

• To ensure more accurate billing, Google AdWords automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports. However, Analytics reports these clicks as visits to your website in order to show the complete set of traffic data.

Visits vs. Visitors vs. Absolute Unique Visitors

Analytics measures both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website's perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.

‘Visitors’ represents the number of unique users that visit your site on a daily basis. Any sessions from the same user on the same day will be aggregated into a single visitor, but may represent two or more separate visits. 

In the Absolute Unique Visitor report, all visits from the same user for the entire active date range you have selected will be aggregated so that they will be counted as a single absolute unique visitor, regardless of how many different days they visited your site and how many times they visited your site on each day.

Page Views vs. Unique Page Views

A page view is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional page view. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second page view will be recorded as well.

A unique page view, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates page views that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique page view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.