Six Critical Website Metrics Explained

Imagine having a grocery store. Every day, customers enter the store, look for, and hopefully purchase items from the store. Each store has an inventory management system and a system that tracks customers, purchase history and the effectiveness of promotions.

Now, picture that same store without any buyer tracking or inventory information – it would be extremely difficult to know how to target ads and promotions, as well we as to know what is not working.

A website without analytics, or with analytics that track but that site managers do not engage with, follows that same principle. It is imperative that content creators have a basic understanding of website stats, tracking, what it means and how it applies, regardless of what the site is built to do.

This article focuses on the terms used within Google Analytics, but there are countless website tracking programs available, most of which use similar terms.

In Google Analytics, the primary information needed to see the health of each website and the overarching traffic patterns is available within the Audience Overview. Google Analytics should default to the Audience overview page, but if it does not, simply select ‘Audience’ then ‘Overview’ in the left, side-bar menu.

1. Sessions

Also known as visitors or users, sessions show the full number of people that have come into the site within a specific period of time. Think of sessions like a counter in a ticket queue – they don’t know if it is the same person coming through the queue five times, they just see 5 total people have come through.

2. Users

Depending on the program, users can also be called unique visitors. This is the number of individuals that have come to the website within a specific period of time. Regardless of the number of visits that occurred within that period of time, the unique visitor field will only count them each on their first visit.

3. Page Views

This is the total number of times pages have been viewed during all sessions on the website. It will count every page that a user visits during a session to the website, regardless of the number of times they go to each page.

4. Average Session Duration

The average length of time that a user spends on the website during each session, regardless of the page.

5. Bounce Rate

This is a little bit different on each analytics program. In Google Analytics, a bounce is considered to be someone that comes to a website and leaves without interacting with anything on the page. The bounce rate is the percentage of people that come to the site and bounce off of it.

6. Percentage of new sessions

The percentage of new sessions is a rough indicator of how many visitors to the site are first-time visitors.

Tips for using the information

It’s important to keep an eye on the date range as these stats are reviewed. Google Analytics automatically defaults to show the last 30 days of data. To see trends, expand the date range to three months, six months and a year, and change the data display from showing by day to showing by either week or month.

Review these data points to see if users are coming back to the website, or if they are just coming to the page once and bouncing off. Understanding the amount of time people spend on the website, in combination with the number of page views is critical as well. A high bounce rate or a low number of pages per session is a good indicator that the website content is not catching user’s attention.

Utilize these metrics to establish an understanding of the user base so that when it’s time to change the website or to update the homepage, there will be a clear understanding of where the website is excelling and where it can be improved.