Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider

Traffic is a generic term. Let’s get more specific and consider some of the most common metrics used to describe the number of visitors you receive. (This section also acts as a nonalphabetized glossary.)

• Pageviews: the total number of pages viewed by all your visitors. Repeated views of the same page are included in this figure.

• Sessions: this concept is harder to define, but it’s crucial because it’s often used in reports within Google Analytics. When a user first arrives on your site, a session is started within which the user may take many actions, such as visiting multiple pages. After thirty minutes of inactivity, at midnight of the given day, or if the user leaves and comes back from a different site or ad campaign, the session ends.

• Users: The total number of people who came to the site—this is calculated by Google by looking at how many people started one or more sessions.

• New users: The total number of first-time users (people Google believes to be on your site for the first time [obviously an estimate dependent on browser cookies])

• Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions on your site—it’s a measure of how many visitors leave after landing somewhere on your site directly from that page versus those who stay and explore other pages before leaving. This number can vary wildly from one analytics suite to another. Since there isn’t further action, the session duration for bounce traffic is considered to be 0 seconds long.

• Average session duration: Pretty much what it says—how long does the average session last? It can be useful as a metric to determine how engaged your readers are. It’s technically more nuanced than that, but you can think of it as the average amount of time spent on the site by your visitors.

The exact implementation of these concepts by your web analytics tool will affect the numbers you see. Google Analytics’ figures are generally accepted as a standard of sorts in the industry.

A good analytics solution will show you these site usage details as well as plenty more about the profiles of your visitors (network, country, language), their browser profiles, your site’s traffic sources, which search engine keywords were used (for people who weren’t logged into Google while performing the search), and so on.

You can learn a lot about your visitors by taking a look at these metrics and by not just focusing on more vanity metrics as a whole (like the total number of pageviews).