Google Analytics Visitor Statistics: The Basics

Google Analytics is run on all YSM websites. It’s a powerful application that provides detailed statistics on how visitors interact with all our sites. If you aren’t familiar with web analytics you may find it difficult to understand many of the terms commonly used and how to make sense of the data.

One of the most basic but important metrics is visitor statistics. When you log into your account it’s one of the first things you’ll see. Here are meanings for the basic visitor statistic terms used in Google Analytics. Knowing these terms and what they measure is the first step to understanding your visitors’ behavior and how you can improve your site.

• The Overview Line Graph: Once you login to Google Analytics the first report you’ll see is a line graph that shows the number of visits for the past 30 days (this is the default timeframe but you can edit the date range). If you put your mouse on the blue dots within the graph, you will see the number of visitors for that particular day.
  
  
• Visits: The number of visits to your site. A user can view any number of pages, but the visit will count as one. A visit typically ends after the visitor either closes the browser or is inactive for 30 minutes.
  
  
• Unique Visitors: The number of unduplicated visitors (meaning they are counted only once) to your website over the course of a specified time period. For example, if a user leaves and comes back to your site five times, that person is counted as one unique visitor. Google Analytics knows this by automatically installing a “cookie” in the visitor’s browser.
  
  
• Pageviews: The total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
  
  
• Pages/Visit: The average number of pages a visitor viewed before leaving your website.
  
  
• Avg. Visit Duration: This is the average of the length of time a visitor stays on your site. For example, if someone spends 10 minutes on your site, and someone else spends 20 minutes, the average visit time would be 15 minutes.
  
  
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a page, and immediately leave (a.ka. “bounce”).
  
  
• % of New Visits: The percentage of new visitors to your site compared to visitors who have already been to your site.