Google Analytics Glossary: Everything You Need To Know About The Software!
Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most popular and widely used analytics program on the web. It comes as no surprise as it is one of the most insightful, extensive, and useful analytics tools out there that provides a number of invaluable details on your website and traffic. It is from Google after all – the king of data.
Gif Source: Search Engine Land
That said, Google Analytics is also known for being extremely complicated and intimidating. Part of the complication is because of the fact that it is an advanced solution that provides pretty much everything you need to know. And that’s precisely why you need to use it no matter how intimidating it is.
Here’s a detailed Google analytics glossary of terms for you to familiarise yourself with the product and get started.
Before we begin, it is important to understand that while Google Analytics is amazing, B2B marketers often need something more. Check out this article to know what it is.
Google Analytics Glossary
Account
Your account is the place where all of your analytics and details in Google live. You can have multiple accounts within your workspace if you manage other businesses as well. It is generally best to maintain separate accounts for each business you manage.
Acquisition
Acquisition refers to the way or the source through which a visitor reaches your website. Some of these sources can be social media, email, organic traffic, direct traffic from Google, etc.
Assisted Conversion
Assisted conversion is when a user goes through multiple channels of your digital presence before converting to the next level in the buyer journey. For example, if a user first clicks on a Twitter link to arrive at your website, then exits and later returns to your website again from Google, Twitter will be considered as an assisted conversion channel.
Active Users and Active Pages
“Active Users” is a metric that is available under your audience segment. Google Analytics gives you a real-time view of the number of currently active users on your website since the last 30 minutes, that is, the number of visitors that are currently viewing some kind of content on your website.
“Active Pages” shows you the pages on your website that people are currently viewing in real-time on your website.
With these two metrics, you can see how many people are on your website and what content they are looking at as well.
Adwords (now Google Ads)
Google Adwords is a pay-per-click advertising program by Google where marketers use keywords to get their ads displayed on the Google Search Engine pages and Google display advertising platform. Google Adwords has now been rebranded to “Google Ads”. You can easily track Google Ads data directly from Analytics.
Average Session Duration
The average session duration tells you the average amount of time (mostly in seconds) a visitor has spent on your website. For this, Google considers the total average session duration, rather than the time spent on each page or on the last page they viewed. For this reason, if a person views only one page on your website before exiting, the average session duration is likely to be zero.
Bounce
Bounce is when a visitor enters your website and immediately leaves without clicking anything else. In technical terms, a session is considered bounced when a person clicks into your website and does not request for any further information from the website’s server. It shows that a visitor did not explore any pages on the website.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate indicates the number of times a visitor landed on your website or a page and left without doing anything else. It is calculated by dividing the total number of times a visitor landed on your page and left without clicking anything, by the total number of times they visited your website.
Channels
Channels describe the various segments of incoming traffic on your website. By default, you will have channels of ‘organic search’, ‘paid search’, ‘social’, and ‘email’ each of which indicates the visitors acquired from the respective sources of traffic. You can also create more custom segments, depending on the new sources of traffic that you create.
Conversion
Conversion is when a visitor completes or fulfills a specific goal that you may set up in your analytics account. You can set different conversion milestones from simple ones like visiting more than one page or even making a purchase. It helps measure the performance of your website as you can monitor conversions to see if the outcome is as expected.
Conversion Rate
In Google Analytics, the goal conversion rate is calculated as the number of goal conversions divided by the number of sessions, times 100. To put it simply, if you have 100 visitors and 5 of them convert, the conversion rate is 5%.
Exit
Exit refers to the last page a person visited in a session before they clicked out of the page or closed their browser.
Frequency
Frequency is the number of times a person visits a particular page over a given time period. The total number of sessions divided by the total number of users gives the frequency of a page.
Impression
Impressions are the number of times your ad appeared on a user’s screen. It doesn’t include clicks or views, it merely counts the number of times the ad was visible.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the traffic or visitors originating from natural or organic, unpaid search results on search engines like Google or Bing. It works when your website meets all SEO specifications and appears on search results naturally.
Referrals
Referrals describe the traffic originating from link clicks on other pages. These links may or may not be on already defined sources of traffic such as social media or organic.
Site Speed
Site speed describes the average speed at which your website is loading. This is an important metric to consider as even search engines like Google prefer and give weightage to sites that load fast.
Session
A session is the period of time for which a visitor actively engaged with your page. Several sessions can happen during a given date range.
Visitors Flow
Visitors flow is essentially a report that shows how visitors engaged with your site throughout a session. It includes all activities starting from the landing page to the exit page.
Bottom line
Apart from the above-mentioned ones, there are various other metrics and terms associated with analytics that could be used. But, these are the most important terms that you are going to come across. Keep this glossary handy every time you open your analytics account and you’ll get the hang of it in no time.
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