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Google Analytics is one of the best website traffic tracking tools on the market. And it’s free, which makes it even better. If you have Google Analytics running on your site, at some point you’ll want to see a report related to the traffic on your site. The basic report that is produced for a certain period of time contains a ton of great information about your website traffic. Once you see this report, you may want an explanation of each section of the report. Here’s how to understand what you see.

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics report of your own, Google Analytics Sample Report so you can follow along.

Pages 1 & 2 – The Dashboard

This page is a general overview of the report. At the top left, you’ll see the website domain name. At the top right, you’ll see the date range for this report. If you have comparison reporting turned on for this particular report, it will show the date range that is the comparison.

The most visually impacting element on the first page is the traffic bar line graph. This shows a day-by-day graph of the traffic on your site. In the sample you downloaded above, the current month’s traffic is in blue. the comparison month’s traffic is in green.

Site Traffic

Just below the traffic bar graph is the general site usage numbers.

Site Usage

There are some terms here that need to be defined. The full glossary of terms is available here, but below are some important terms for this post:

• Visits – “A period of interaction between a visitor’s browser and a particular website, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time. For the purpose of Google Analytics reports, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes. You can update this setting with an addition to our tracking code.” [source]
• Visitor – “A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website’s perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.” [source]
  
  
• Pageviews – “Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed. This can be an HTML or similar page with tracking code being loaded by a browser, or a call to _trackPageview() to simulate a pageview.” [source]

• Pages/Visit – The number of pages a visitor viewed in a single visit or session.
• Bounce Rate - “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” [source]
• Average Time on Site – The amount of time a visitor remained on the site during a visit or session.
• New Visits/Visitor – “Google Analytics records a visitor as new when any page on your site has been accessed for the first time by a web browser. This is accomplished by setting a first-party cookie on that browser. Thus, new visitors are not identified by the personal information they provide on your site, but are rather uniquely identified by the web browser they used.” [source]
• Returning Visits/Visitor – “Google Analytics records a visitor as ‘returning’ when the _utma cookie for your domain exists on the browser accessing your site.” [source]

You’ll also see a map overlay that is a visual representation of the geographical areas your visitors are coming from.

Near the bottom of the first page, you’ll see a traffic sources overview that is a pie chart of the ways people find your website. This is broken down into three types of traffic sources – search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc), direct traffic (typing your domain name into the web browser), and referring sites (clicking on a link from another website to yours).

Traffic Sources

On page two, you’ll see New vs. Returning visitor types. These terms are defined above. Next to this column, you’ll see content overview on the right side of page 2. This is a list of the most popular pages on your site during the report period, in descending order.

Now, how do you make sense of all this information?

This basic information is a good way to keep a thumb on how people are using your website. It indicates how long people stay with the site once they arrive. If the time spent on the site is very brief, it may be time to consider changing the content or navigation of the site to make it more appealing for people to stay on the site. If people find the site through direct traffic, but not through search engines, it may be worth the effort to invest some time in optimizing the website for search engines so the site can be indexed properly.

These numbers are indicators of how people interact with you online. If you have 2,000 visitors, but no contacts from those visitors, perhaps a better call to action or contact method should be in place. The numbers are great for tracking your progress and measuring success for your website.

Most importantly, the numbers outlined in the report will need to be interpreted for your organization. A non-profit organization will have different priorities for their website than a bluegrass band will have for theirs. When interpreting these numbers, you may be faced with the task of establishing goals and setting priorities for the website that are in line with the goals and priorities of your organization.

That covers the first section of the Google Analytics report. Any questions?