Understand Your Website’s Analytics: 11 Terms You Need to Know

Whether you’ve realised it or not, your business’ website is most likely your greatest asset. Therefore, understanding website analytics is crucial for improving the performance of your website and marketing efforts. In this blog, we will help you understand some of the basic terms and metrics you might find in your website analytics tools and discuss what you should pay attention to when analysing your website data.

Channels

Channels refer to the sources that are driving traffic to your website. In platforms like Google Analytics, you will see the different sources of traffic such as organic search, social media, referral, direct, and paid search. You will also see metrics highlighting the performance of each of these channels. This information will give you an idea of which marketing channels are the most effective in driving traffic to your website and where you should focus your efforts.

Users

Another critical area to focus on is the number of users visiting your website. Understanding the number of unique visitors to your website will give you an idea of the reach of your marketing efforts and help you determine how many people are interested in your products or services. Analysing users and their interaction with the website can be invaluable when making future marketing and business decisions.

Page views

The number of page views is another important metric to monitor. This will give you an idea of your visitors' engagement level and whether they are exploring your website and finding the information they seek.

When page views greatly exceed the number of users, you know that people visit your website and take a good look at the content. On the other hand, if you have page views that are almost similar to unique users, then these users may not be exploring your whole site. If this is the case, have a look and see if there are any potential barriers or obstacles within their user journey and address these.

Bounce Rate and Engagement Rate

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is a metric that measures the number of visitors who leave your website after only visiting one page for less than 10 seconds and haven’t engaged. A high bounce rate can indicate a problem with your website or that users are not finding what they want. This is an important metric to pay attention to, as it can help you identify areas for improvement in your website design and content.

Engagement Rate

Since the introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), there has been less focus on bounce rate and more on engagement rate. The engagement rate is almost the opposite of the bounce rate. It calculates the number of engaged users, so a higher percentage of engaged traffic is better.

Sessions, Average Pages per Session and Average Session Duration

Sessions

Website sessions calculate the number of times a user has entered the website to start a browsing journey. This is not the same as unique users, as a unique user can visit your site multiple times, meaning each time they visit the site, they start a new session. It is also not to be confused with page views, as page views show the total number of pages viewed multiple times by multiple users. Sessions can have multiple page views.

Average Pages per Session

The average pages per session calculates the number of sessions divided by the number of page views to give you an idea of how many pages a person will look at per individual session.

Average Session Duration

Another key metric within the sessions family is the average length of a session. This is the average time visitors spend on your website during their session. Understanding the average session length will give you an idea of how engaged your visitors are with your website and how well they are finding the information they are looking for.

Demographics

Demographics is another key area to focus on in your website analytics. Understanding the age, gender, location, and interests of your visitors can help you plan your marketing strategy more effectively and inform your overall marketing targeting.

Conversions and Events

Finally, one of the most important areas to focus on within your analytics is conversions and events. Conversions are actions that you have defined as important for your business and its objectives, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter.

Events are similar but can be more specific actions, such as clicking on a button or watching a video. By tracking conversions and events, you can see how your marketing efforts are contributing to your overall business goals and identify areas for improvement. Since the introduction of GA4, events have become more important due to the focus on engagement. As a top tip, without proper set-up of scroll events, your engagement may be reporting as 0, which might not be accurate.

Understand Your Objectives

Website analytics is a crucial concept to monitor and improve the performance of your website and marketing efforts. By paying attention to what we’ve explored in this blog and reviewing these terms and metrics in tandem with other analytics measurements, you will gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing and make data-driven decisions to improve your website performance and marketing strategy.

BONUS TIP: Keep Your Objectives in Mind

When reviewing the data, always keep in mind your business and marketing objectives, write down the questions that you want the answers to and think about the purpose of what you want to find. Then, the data will be used to provide the answers.

If you’re a little hesitant and don’t know where to start, Dynam is more than happy to talk to you and see if we can support you in any way. Get in touch here.