Spending all your time looking at analytics reports isn’t your job. As you can see from the below, even a basic understanding of analytics requires a lot. And this only scratches the surface of what analytics can tell you. That’s why you need to partner with our SEO solutions who knows their way around Google Analytics and can provide you with the actionable insights you need to improve your website.
Sessions
This is the number of visits to your website within the date range. Every visit counts as a session. If a user comes to your site, closes their browser, and then returns to your site, this will count as two sessions. By default, a session times out after 30 minutes. If a user leaves their browser open on one of your pages for 30 minutes without interacting with the page, their session will start over when they return.
Pageviews
The number of pages that have been viewed during the time range. Every pageview counts. If a user refreshes your contact page 100 times, that will count as 100 pageviews. Knowing how many pages have been viewed on your site isn’t the most helpful metric. There’s not a whole lot you can do with this data other than confirm that people are looking at your content.
Session duration
This is one of the least useful metrics you’ll ever see. It’s a measurement of the average of a single session, taken from the first action until the session ends. There are two huge problems with this number. First, by default, all bounces are calculated as zero seconds. So even though a user lands on your site and reads your entire blog post, Google Analytics counts it as nothing. If you have a high bounce rate, this number will be skewed very low. Second, since a session can last up to 30 minutes without activity, a relatively worthless visit could count as a half hour. If you get a lot of these types of sessions, your average session will be artificially inflated. There’s very little value in this number, so don’t spend much time thinking about it.
Pages Per Sessions
This is the average number of pages a visitor sees per visit. As with sessions per user, it’s not necessarily bad if this number is low. When evaluating this, think of how many pages a user really needs to see before they can convert. If they can fill out a lead form from a landing page, then you don’t necessarily need them to see a lot of pages. More pages per session is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, a high number here could be a sign of a difficult conversion path that’s costing you customers.
Bounce Rate
One of the most misunderstood metrics, bounce rate by default in Google Analytics is the percentage of sessions that consist of only one pageview. In other words, a user lands on a page and doesn’t click to go to any other pages. Looking at bounce rate as a whole can be dangerous. It might make you think you have a bad website when the reality is that your users are often accomplishing the entire purpose of their visit in a single page. Don’t judge your website entirely on bounce rate. However, if your homepage bounce rate is very high on mobile but low on desktop, then you might have something to look into.
Social Media Sessions
When users reach your site through a link on a social media channel like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Note that this only works for channels that are identified as social media by Google. So your proprietary social networking site for jugglers might not fit here, but it might fall under referral instead.
Organic Searches
When people find your site through a search engine like Google, Bing, or AltaVista.
Referrers
When users reach your site via a link from another site. Note that referral data does not always pass from one site to another.
Pages
This report shows you the pageviews and percentage of pageviews for the top URLs on your website. Your homepage is typically identified as just a /, and it is almost always the top page on the report.
Keywords
Countries
