The Key Players
Visits and visitors are perhaps two of the most important metrics you’ll discover. Many calculations and other metrics incorporate visitors and visits to provide better, more detailed data (Kaushik, 2009). Visits, more commonly referred to as ‘sessions,’ are the number of times someone came to your site. All analytic tools are different, but visits is generally the number of times your site was viewed, and will contain an overlap of repeat visitors. That’s where unique visitors comes into play. Unique visitors uses the assigned, secret client ID number stored as a cookie on a person’s browser to map that person’s journey (Rosche, 2016). The unique visitors metric gives a better overall picture of how many actual people visited your site versus the number of times your site was visited. There are still loopholes that may over count unique visitors, because cookies are assigned to a person’s browser, not themselves, so switching from Chrome on your work computer to Safari on your home computer will result in two identifiers and two user IDs even though it could be the same person (Rosche, 2016). Nevertheless, both of these statistics are great for gauging the immediate traffic to your website and can be easily measured over time to see progress or lack thereof.
Pages on your website are just that - all of the pages on your website available for Google to index. Pages are a dimension that then offer several metrics to give better reporting (Gianoglio, 2012). Page views, and unique page views, and metrics. These metrics allow for a marketer to see how many times each page has been views with the option to eliminate the duplicate users. Page views is becoming a more obsolete metric when compared to sessions (Kaushik, 2009). Unique page views offers a better insight in to how well a certain page is doing. If unique page views and overall page views are drastically different, it’s worth giving that page further review. It may be confusing users, causing them to keep returning to that page. It may also indicate that it’s an educational page that users are frequenting for good reasons (Van Den Berg, 2018). Another downfall to page views in our more modern times is that many rich-media website experiences, like embedded videos, may not generate a page view in your analytics (Kaushik, 2009).
Events are a metric used to track specific actions. Events can further be narrowed down to unique events which eliminate any duplicate users. Events can be anything from a user clicking a button, adding something to their cart, checking out, or submitting a form (Mozilla, 2018). Events are useful in that they show definite action on your site and can be used later for specific ad targeting based on any events a user completed using Google Tag Manager (Martinez, 2018). For non-eCommerce sites, form completions or lead submissions may be the best way to gauge a page’s or website’s success with clients.
Scope in Google Analytics
With all of these metrics being so important, are you surprised to learn Google Analytics doesn’t display them all together? This is where ‘scope’ comes into play. Each dimension and metric fall within a scope, which are hit, user, sessions, and product. A hit is any action taken on the site, such as a page view or event. A session is made up of several hits, made by a user with a unique identifier. Google Analytics processes each hit separately, then once it’s gone through their filter, it assigns the hits to a session and the sessions to a user (Rosche, 2016). In one day, a user can have multiple sessions, hits, and products.
So why is scope important? By keeping metrics organized by scope, Google Analytics can better show you the data you’re trying to see. Combining multiple scopes, especially hit and session scopes, can result in confusing data that may not give you the overall picture you were hoping for (Rosche, 2016). Instead of combing the dimension ‘pages’ with the metric ‘sessions,’ you would combine ‘pages’ with ‘unique page views’ to provide a report showing your top pages (West, 2015).
Applying the Knowledge
As mentioned above, page views doesn’t always provide the best overall picture. It’s great to see how many people visited a page, but if they don’t do your intended action, did your site and business benefit? The best performing pages then are those with high traffic and high engagement. Using a metric like ‘average time on pages’ you can see which high traffic pages have above average times (Reeves, n.d.). This won’t include those who stayed on a page then exited, but, if they were on a page for a long time, then stayed on your site, it’s certainly an important statistic to see!
Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile posted a great article on the changing perceptions of the web, and more importantly, the myths associated with the web. His first myth tackles page views. In a study by Chartbeat, they reported 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page (Haile, 2014). This proves that page views may not by the best indicator. This study was from 2013/2014, so you can imagine it’s changed even more since then.
References
Haile, T. (2014, March 9). What You Think You Know About the Web is Wrong. Time. Retrieved from: http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/
Gianoglio, J. (2012, December 20). Google Analytics Metrics & Dimensions. Bounteous. Retrieved from: https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2012/12/20/google-analytics-metrics-dimensions/
Reeves, C. (n.d.). My Favorite Analytics Report: 4 Steps to Find Your Most Important Pages. Fizzle. Retrieved from: https://fizzle.co/sparkline/favorite-analytics-report-4-steps-find-important-pages
Rosche, E. (2016, November 30). Understanding Scope in Google Analytics Reporting. Bounteous. Retrieved from: https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2016/11/30/understanding-scope-google-analytics-reporting/?ns=l
Van Der Berg, A. (2018, May 2). What are Pageviews in Google Analytics? Yoast. Retrieved from: https://yoast.com/what-are-pageviews-in-google-analytics/
Van Der Berg, A. (2018, April 10). What are Sessions in Google Analytics? Yoast. Retrieved from: https://yoast.com/sessions-in-google-analytics/
West, B. (2015, December 21). Common Reporting Pitfalls in Google Analytics. Bounteous. Retrieved from: https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2015/12/21/google-analytics-common-reporting-pitfalls/
Hi Kristin,
ReplyDeleteGreat overall summary of foundational metrics businesses should follow. I think you ended it well by emphasizing that high percentages in certain areas don't necessarily mean you're achieving your goals. It's important to align those metrics with your original intentions.