Google Analytics is a powerful tool when it comes to digital marketing, it lets you track a ton of things related to your website organic or paid.
Key performance indicators (KPI) metrics of Google Analytics tells you a lot about your website performance and audience behavior.
Google analytics measures these metrics using cookies on your website, these cookies stores all the activities and transfers these details to Google analytics.
Google Analytics has strict regulations when importing data, GA doesn’t allow personal information like name, phone no, or e-mail to be imported. It can lead to banning your account if regulations are violated.
Pageviews
Pageviews refers to the number of pages a single user has visited it also calculates when the page is reloaded again as a new page view.
Unique pageviews
Unique pageviews refers to aggregate of pageviews by a single user during the same session, that is when a user loads the same page 5 times page view record it as 5 pageviews whereas unique page view records it as 1 as it records based on session
Session
Session is the time frame that a user has spent on your website, a user can have multiple sessions based on the interaction. when a user lands on a page a timestamp is created to measure a session.
To put in other words when a user opens your website visits several pages in a row, and then closes the browser this is recorded as 1 session. If the user opens the browser to check your website again, it’s recorded as a new session, which Google analytics calculates using cookies by tracking IP address and browser.
Page/session
No of pages visited during a particular session is regarded as page/session, whenever a user loads a New page Google Analytics captures the time which helps understand the pages visited in a particular session.
Session duration
Session duration is the time duration which a particular session last, since Google Analytics doesn’t calculate the exit time, son duration is not calculated unless a user land on different page/reload the same page. In order to overcome such problems Google analytics session times out automatically after a period of 30min.
Let’s say a user lands on your page named X, then he checks out another page in your website, let’s name it y. He then moves on to another page named z, later he closes the browser.
Now
Session duration = time spent on x + time spent on y + time spent on z (0)
Since after visiting page z, the user hasn’t moved on to the next page which results in not recording the time duration spent on the page Z.
Because of this session duration becomes a useless metric.
Users
User is defined as the number of people who visits a site, when a user visits a site a cookie is stored in the browser which then creates a unique Identifier in the user explorer.
However user dosen’t identify as a person that is when the same person visits your page in a different device or browser, it’s recorded as a new user.
Newuser
A new user is a metric to define a user never visited your website before, this metrics dosent need to be exactly a person as mentioned before.
When a “person A” visits your site through chrome in his phone, Google Analytics assigns a unique Identifier to it. If the same person visits the same site from a different browser or device Google analytics assigns a new unique Identifier and considers it as a new user.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is a page metric that reflects the single page sessions meaning, percentage of visitors who visit a page and goes to another site/ closes it rather visiting another page. The bounce rate is the number of single-page visits divided by the number of total visits.
Consider two people visiting your site
Person A visit a page in your site and leaves the page, person B visit a page and moves another page in your site.
Now,
bounce rate = single page visits(1) / total visits(2)
Bounce rate = 50%
Avg time on page
Average time on page is a metric that calculates the time spent on a page before moving to the next page.
This metric is although dosen’t count time spent on single page sessions or the time duration spent on the final page before moving to another site or closing e browser
Entrance
It means no of users entrance on a particular page, this Google analytics metrics shows you what page most people enter in your site.
If a person enter your site and has the following path pattern
Enter —-> page A —-> page B —-> exit
Then,
Page A = 1 session, 1 entrance, 1 pageview
Page B = 0 session, 0 entrance, 1 pageview
Exit %
Exit rate ( Exit % ) as shown in the Google analytics shows how often users exit from a particular page, if a site has higher exit rate it doesn’t mean it will have Higher bounce rate, since users could have came on to the page through other pages in the same page. Whereas if a page has low exit the page would have a low exit rate.
