At its basic level, Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about your website, user behavior and more. To better understand the basic reports found in Google Analytics, you must first understand the terms or metrics Google Analytics uses to categorize your site’s statistics.
Many of these terms are self-explanatory, but some are not. This post will define some of the common metrics used in Google Analytics reporting. An understanding of these common metrics will help you identify the information you want to know about your site, how to find that information and what metrics you want to focus on when creating custom reports.
Common terms
- Bounce: a single-page visit to your site with no further actions taken
- Bounce rate: the percentage of single-page visits that occur when a visitor immediately leaves a landing page
- Campaign: a way to track or associate visitor activity with different sources and promotions, which are typically created by tagging URLs. Example campaigns include “Fall Recruitment,” “Undergraduate Admissions Guide” or “Move-In Weekend.”
- Exit: the last page viewed by a user before leaving your site
- Funnel: the defined process that a user takes to complete a goal, which is typically a set of Web pages that direct the user to an end goal
- Goal conversion: occurs when a visitor completes an action (i.e. reaches a page) defined by you through Google Analytics as more valuable than a normal page view. Examples of a conversion include reaching a “Thank you for registering” or order confirmation page.
- Goal conversion rate: the percentage of sessions on a site that resulted in a goal conversion
- Landing page: the first page a Web visitor accesses when they enter your site
- Medium: the means by which a visitor received the link to your site in campaign tracking. Examples include email, PDF or a tweet.
- Referrer: the page external to your site that a visitor clicked on that brought them to your site
- Source: the origin of a referral in campaign tracking. Examples include newsletter, social media or print publication.
- Visit (or session): the period of time a visitor is on your site, which begins when the browser loads the first page and ends when the browser is closed or the visitor has been inactive for 30 minutes
Unique versus non-unique
Several Google Analytics metrics offer a unique and non-unique counterpart:
- Visitor: a site usage metric that counts the number of users who visit your site
- Absolute unique visitor: all visits from the same user for the entire active date range you have selected are aggregated to count as a single unique visitor, regardless of how many visits that user actually made to your site
The visitor metric is the closest reflection of the number of actual people who visit your site. The unique visitor count can be compromised easily, so it is recommended to look at this metric as an overall trend not as a literal count.
The second common set of unique versus non-unique relate to how often pages are viewed on your site:
- Pageviews: a count of the number of times a page is viewed or loaded
- Unique pageviews: aggregate of the page views of a single user to reflect the number of visits a page was loaded at least one time (only counts the first load of a page during a user’s visit)
Dimensions versus metrics
When you are creating a custom report (to be discussed in a later post) or even navigating through one of the basic reports provided by Google Analytics, you may encounter the terms dimension and metric.
A dimension (in red) is a text string used to further define an item. Examples of dimensions include page title, URL, browser type and campaign name.
A metric (in blue) is a number, such as bounce rate, time on site or pageviews.
Writer’s note: Definitions were developed in consultation with “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics” by Brian Clifton and the Google Analytics Help site.