Learning About Your Visitors With Google Analytics

Posted on | July 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

The key to running a successful website is catching and keeping the attention of your visitors. Google Analytics offers many tools which can help you learn more about how users interact with your site.

After you enter your Google Analytics account, click on the visitors link on the left sidebar of the page. The first page you reach, the visitors overview page, presents a fairly robust way of learning about the visitors to your page. Like the main overview, the visitors overview shows you how many users have accessed your site and can be sorted by day, week, and month. It also has a number of other options which help you understand how your site is being used.

Visitor Statistics

• Visits is the number of visitors your site has received. Each time a visitor enters your site, this is increased. It is different from pageviews because it only shows each time a person enters your site for the first time.
• Absolute Unique Visitors shows how many unique IP addresses (an identification number every internet connection has) have reached your site. This doesn’t include returning visitors and can be used to show how many new vs. repeat visitors your site receives.
• Pageviews is how many pages of your website have been viewed. This number is increased each time that a visitor views a different page in your website.
• Average Pageviews is the average number of pages a user looks at per visit on the site. This can be used with time on site to see how long people stay on your site.
• Time On Site shows how long the average user spends on your site. This can range from seconds to minutes to hours, and can be used with average pageviews to see how people spend their time on your site.
• Bounce Rates are extremely informative. A “bounce” is when a visitor views a single page of your site and then continues on to a different site. You want this to be as low as possible in order to maximize how long and how many pages a visitor views.
• New Visits shows the percentage how many absolutely new visitors are entering your site. This is different from unique visits because while unique visitors just shows how many different IPs have visited your site in the selected time frame, new visits only counts how many people have viewed your site for the first time.

Google Analytics offers even more information about how people use your site if you click further into the ‘visitors’ submenu.

• Benchmarking compares your site statistics to other sites your size. It is useful to compare various data Google Analytics collects to other sites.
• Map Overlay is useful because it tells you where your visitor is located. You can sort by country and drill down further into viewing by State. If you run a business, you might want to see where your products are most popular, or if you get a lot of visitors from another country, you might want to add another language localization to your site.
• New vs. Returning adds further functionality to the data on the visitor overview, displaying a pie graph comparing new vs returning visitors and giving more ways to compare and view this information.
• Languages tells you what languages the computer that visits you is operating in. While this data is useful, it has to be taken with a grain of salt because many computers are set to English by default and never changed.
• Visitor Trending displays the same data as presented on the Visitor Overview page, but sorts it by day in an easy to read bar graph.
• Visitor Loyalty shows how many users return to your site and how many times they do so. It presents the data in an easy to read line graph sorted by number of times visited. This can be used to tell how many times the average user visits your site. It also shows visit recency, presenting a line graph of the relative amounts of visitors per day. Similar presentation can be found for length of visit and depth of visit, which shows how many pages on a site your visitors viewed.
• Browser Capabilities is useful because it shows the various browsers, operating systems, and computer information that your readers are using. This is important to web developers because all browsers display websites differently. Knowing the most popular browser, OS, and other computer information for your website allows us at Pica to design a better user experience for your visitors.
• Network Location is interesting, but not incredibly useful. You can learn what internet service providers your visitors are using, and their connection speed. This can be useful for web designers.
• User Defined allows you to view custom reports for your website. However, Google Analytics already displays so many statistics that it is rare that custom statistics are necessary.

New vs. Returning

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