What Do All Those Google Analytics Terms Mean?

Google Analytics uses a lot of terms. Some of them are self-explanatory, but some aren't. Read on to find out the meaning of terms that bloggers should know.

Google Analytics uses a lot of terms. Some of them are self-explanatory, but some aren't. Read on to find out the meaning of terms that bloggers should know.

I grouped these by topic and included an image for each so you'll know where to find them. Most of the screenshots are from a Google demo account.

Google Analytics Audience Metrics

Let's start by learning a bit about your audience. This information comes from Audience reports

Demographics – This is information about your readers. Google Analytics only includes age and gender in its demographics overview.

You can find your demographics by clicking Audience > Demographics > Overview.

Users and New Users – Users are simply people who visit your site. Actually, Google has a more sophisticated way of identifying and counting users, but for our purposes, we'll stick with users are people who visit our site.

You can find your users by clicking Audience > Overview.

Note: If your date range is one week and someone visits your site 4 times that week, he or she will only be counted as one user for the week–not four.

New and Returning Visitors – This metric tells you what percentage of your sessions are from people who have never visited your site versus people who have been there before.

You can find your visitors by clicking Audience > Overview.

Note: Your users and visitors won't add up. Google has some interesting ways of counting them. Don't worry about it. It doesn't really matter for bloggers.

Mobile – This tells us what kind of device someone uses to visit our site. The Google demo account has a majority of desktop visitors, but most bloggers will find that their readers are using mobile devices.

You can find your mobile users by going to Audience > Mobile > Overview.

Google Analytics Traffic Metrics

Let's start by going to Audience > Overview. There are several traffic metrics that you can see on this screen.

Pageviews – This is just like it sounds–the number of pages that were viewed on your website. Here's what Google says it is:

“A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.”

To clarify a bit, each of these situations counts as a pageview.

• You visit page A on my site. That's a pageview.
• You click from page A to page B on my site. That's another pageview.
• You click from page B back to page A on my site. That's another pageview.
• You're on page A and hit the refresh button. That's another pageview.

So, the pageviews measurement gives you a broad sense of how many pages have been visited on your blog.

Sessions – A session is what all happens during a set time when I visit your site. The Google definition is:

“A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame.”

For example, you visit page A on my site. That's considered one session. If you visit 50 pages on my website, it is also considered one session.

The definition says that these interactions take place within a given time frame. Here's how that works.

There are two time-based situations that would cause a new session to start – 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight.

Here's a “30 minutes of inactivity” example. Let's say you visit my site and look around some. Then you have to leave to run an errand. You leave my site open in your browser. When you come back, you pick up where you left off and look at more pages on my site.

If your errand takes more than 30 minutes, that would be counted as two sessions because you've had more than 30 minutes of inactivity on my site. If you're only gone for 20 minutes, it would only count as one session.

Sessions are kind of like Cinderella's carriage. It changes at midnight. You visit my site at 11:50 pm, and you look around until 12:15 am. That would count as two sessions: 11:50 until 11:59 would be session one, and 12:00 until 12:15 would be session two.

Google Analytics Acquisition Metrics

For your acquisition metrics, let's start with Aquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

This is where many bloggers start to get really confused because the terms that Google uses don’t always make sense. Hopefully, my explanations will help clear things up for you.

Channels – Channels tell us where your traffic is coming from. They're groupings of the sources of your traffic that have the same medium. We'll talk about medium in a bit.

Source – The source of your traffic tells you where your readers were right before they came to your site. They might have been on Google or Bing or Yahoo. They might have been on Pinterest or Facebook. They may have been visiting another blog and found a link to your site.

Medium – Medium is a grouping of sources. For example, if your source is Google, Bing, or Yahoo, the medium will be “organic” for organic search traffic or “cpc” (cost per click) if you have paid for traffic using Google AdWords.

The social medium will include sources such as Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.

To see your Source/Medium, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

Do you see the “1-10 of 181” in the bottom right? That means that this site had 181 source/medium combinations.

You can tell Google to show you more rows, but be careful with this. I have spent too many hours looking at my referrals and trying to figure out why I was getting 2 sessions from DealsNow or TranslateTheWeb. Believe me, there are much better and more productive ways to spend your time. 🙂

When you're looking at the source/medium, you may see that Twitter traffic has “referral” as its medium. You'll see that some of your Facebook and Pinterest traffic will have “social,” and some will have “referral.” The reason for this is pretty technical, so I'm not going to try to explain it here.

Even if the medium for your social traffic says “referral,” Google still counts it as social traffic when you look at the social report. The Social channel includes this traffic. Here's an example.

Direct – Direct traffic comes from a couple of different places. If someone types your url directly into their browser, it is considered direct traffic. If someone has one of your posts bookmarked on their browser and they click on the bookmark, it's considered direct traffic.

Some other sources of “direct” traffic are:

• A click from an HTTPS site over to your HTTP site
• Improper redirection
• Links in documents such as PDFs or Word documents
• “Dark Social” – Dark social refers to methods of social sharing which cannot easily be attributed to a particular source. Some examples are when you share a link via an email, instant messaging, Skype, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Google Analytics Reader Behavior

These terms tell you what your readers do when they get to your site.

All Pages – All pages are simply all the pages on your website that folks visited. To see the All Pages report, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

A couple of notes on the All Pages report. Look at the bottom right. You'll see there are over 1300 pages listed. I don't have that many posts or pages on my site. If I show more rows, I can see the URLs. You won't recognize all of them because they have weird tracking codes attached. Don't worry about that.

Next, check out the circled numbers. They're giving you information about that specific page. This is great to know.

1. Pageviews
2. Average Time on Page
3. Bounce Rate

Landing Pages – Landing pages are the pages through which a visitor entered your website. An easier way to define it is that a landing page is the first page someone visits when they come to your website.

To see your Landing Pages report, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.

Note: Most likely, your high traffic landing pages are NOT your home page. Instead, it could be that popular blueberry muffin recipe post. For my Cub Scout blog, it's the post I wrote about where Cub Scout patches go on the uniform.

Exit Pages – An exit page is the last page someone was on before they left your site. To see the Exit Pages report, go to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages.

Bounce Rate – Google defines a “bounce” as a single-page session on your site. Basically, someone comes to your site and only looks at one page.

Your “bounce rate” is the number of single-page sessions divided by all sessions. Basically, it's the percentage of your sessions where a user only looked at one page.

You can find your average bounce rate for your site as a whole in several reports. If the report you're looking at has a Bounce Rate column, your average will be at the top of the column. You can also find it on the Audience Overview report.

Pages per Session (pages/session) – This is the average number of pages that a person sees in a session. It includes multiple visits to the same page.

In a single session, your visitor goes to these pages in this order: Page A > Page B > Page A > Page C > Page D > Page A

In this example, the pages per session is 6. Each visit to Page A is counted separtly.

Average Session Duration – This is simple the average amount of time someone spends on your site in one session.

Average Time on Page – This metric is similar to Average Session Duration, but it tells you the average amount of time that people spend on an individual page.

You can find your Average Time on Page on any of the Site Content reports such as All Pages, Landing Pages, and Exit Pages.

While Analytics has lots more terms, these are the ones that are important for bloggers to know and understand.

Do you have any questions about these terms? Comment below and let me know! I'll do my best to answer them.

Thanks for reading!

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