I get a lot of calls from clients that initally want to manage their own analytics data, but don’t understand what a lot of the information means. Here is a quick summary of the dashboard information:
- Visits. This refers to the number of visitors that been to your website, in the example above this is 17,311 between the period of Apr 1st - May 1st 2007 (which is very good!).
- Pages / visit. This refers to the number of pages that each of the visitors looks at on average. In this instance the average is 1.74 pages per user. This is actually quite low, so you may want to look at improving the homepage to draw people into your website. This might include using call to actions, improving the navigation, updating the content etc.
- Bounce rate. This refers to the percentage of users that leave the site from the landing page i.e. they leave the site without looking at any other pages. Bounce rate for this site is 69.71% which is high, and correlates with the low pages per visit.
- Page views. This is the total number of pages that have been viewed over the selected time period, whichi in this instance is 30,080.
- Avg. time on site. This is the average amount of time each user spends on the website. In this case the average time is 2 minutes and 6 seconds. So although the bounce rate is quite high, the average user spends quite a lot of time on the site.
- New visits. This is the amount of completely new visits to the website, so from the data we can see that there has been 65.36% new visits so we know that there is 34.64% repeat visits.
The data that Google collects can be quite detailed, and can give you a fantastic insight into your traffic and how your site is used. The aspects covered above barely scratch the surface of the analysis that can be made. For more information about traffic analysis you can contact us.
