Check out our useful guide to understanding Google Analytics! Google Analytics is one of the most useful tools you have! Get the most out of it by learning these terms.
The essential utility of Google Analytics is so baked into the entire concept of SEO that it’s just assumed you can navigate it. Yet many of the terms are written with a highly tech-literate audience in mind. And in the interest of full disclosure, I use many of these terms in this very blog, and sometimes even forget to define them. Today I’m going to go through some of the terms that might be confusing and explaining them for the layperson.
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Bounce Rate: A “bounce” is when a visitor to your page leaves without interacting. There are a number of reasons this might happen, and not all of them are bad. The bounce rate measures how often this occurs and I’ve discussed it in detail before.
Clicks: How often people have clicked on a link to your site on search results.
Clickthrough Rate (abbrev. CTR): Measures how many people who see your site on search results actually click on it. It’s expressed as a percentage.
Entrances: Each page gets this metric, and it measures how many users started a session on that page. Does one of your VDPs have a ton of Entrances? Could point to a demand in the marketplace.
Events: Tracks how often users interact with things like downloads, mobile ads, and videos.
Exit Page: The last page a user interacts with before leaving your site.
Exit Rate (appears as % Exit): How often users leave your site from a specific page.
Hit: Page views and events in a single grouping.
Impressions: How many times your site was viewed by a user in search rules. This can be any URL in your site, so it includes all VDPs, for example. For reference, taking clicks as a percentage of impressions gives you the CTR.
Landing or Entrance Page: The first page a user gets to for a session.
Page Views (sometimes Screen Views): The total amount of times a user lands on a specific page on your site.
Unique Page Views: How many times a page was accessed at least once during a session.
Pages Per Session (sometimes Average Page Depth): Average number of pages viewed in a session.
Session: How long a user actively engages with your site, measured using Hits from a single user.
Time on Page: How long the average user spends on a page.
User/Visitor: A person who comes to your site.
Traffic: A measure of the volume of users/visitors.
Are there any terms we missed? Let us know in the comments and we’ll do a part 2.
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