Your website is ready, and then? For many companies, the website is their online business card. But online communication calls for action. There has to be something done with the business card. An online tool for monitoring your website is Google Analytics. Google Analytics shows you exactly what visitors are doing on your website, Google Analytics provides information about who your visitors are, which channel your visitors visit to your website, how visitors click through your website, and not entirely important — what conversions your site provides.
ARE YOU HAPPY ONLY WITH ANALYTICS?
With the information you get from Analytics, you can tweak your website. For example, by placing a call-to-action button on a page where many people leave the site, or by responding to the visitor’s search behavior with relevant information. This way you get the most out of your website. In fact, you are never finished with your website. But how does Analytics work now? There are so many statistics that you can not see the forest through the trees.
We would like to take a good look and explain the most common terms in Analytics:
USERS
A user is a unique visitor of your website. The unique visitor has visited your website for at least one time. An example: Your website is visited by visitor A on Wednesday. He looks at 4 pages. On Friday, visitor A returns to your site, but looks at 2 pages. Visitor A is measured in Analytics as one unique visitor.
SESSIONS
The number of sessions is the number of visits by the user. When visitor A visits the site on Wednesday and Friday, visitor A has taken 2 sessions.
PAGE REPORTS
The number of page views indicates how many pages are displayed. Visitor A watched 4 pages on Wednesday and on Friday 2 pages. The number of page views will then reach 6. Also, if someone views your site and refreshes once, it will count as an additional page view, so 2 page views.
SOURCE
The source is the origin of the user, or the channel that the user has directed to your site. For example, a resource may be a search engine, such as Google, a social media channel, such as Facebook, or a domain (other website) that refers to your site.
MEDIUM
The medium is the source category. We make a distinction:
- Search engines like Google. Search engines allow visitors to search in different ways:
- Organic search: People can access organic web traffic on your website (organic), either through unpaid search results in search engines.
- Adwords: Paid search traffic, such as ads, also leads visitors to your site. You then pay as advertiser per click (CPC: cost per click).
- Domains: Referrals through other sites. For example, website B has a link to your website. When a visitor is on website B and he clicks the link to your website, this will be considered a referral.
- Social Media: The medium that visitors refer to your website can also be social, such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Direct traffic, or the number of visitors who, according to Analytics, went directly to your website simply by typing the url into their web browser.
CHANNELS
Under “acquisition traffic” you will find the “Channels” sub-menu. With channels, you can see through which medium visitors come to your site.
BOUNCE PERCENTAGE
The bounce rate indicates how many percent of visits have not seen more than one page of the site and then removed. This may be because the page in question is not attractive enough to read or not redirect to other pages. However, a bounce does not have to be bad. For example, when a visitor searches Google for “contact toptut.com”, the https://www.toptut.com/contact/ page will be displayed in search results. When the visitor clicks on this link, he finds the contact information he needs. Then he will leave the website again. Chances are that the visitor will contact. However, this visit is seen as a bounce by Analytics.
WHAT’S “NOT PROVIDED”?
When a user is logged in to his Google Account, the search terms of this user will not be shown in Google Analytics. Even if a user is logged in to one of the other Google tools (Google+, Analytics, Webmaster Tools), search behavior is not captured. This logged in visitor uses Google’s search function through a secure connection (https). Therefore, from logged in visitors, you will not be able to see the search term searched. Instead, there will be classed as “not provided”.
NOT SET
The term ‘Not set’ is used by organic keywords to indicate that the data that should have been lost has been lost. It may be a technical error or security.