Get familiar with the key terminologies in Google Analytics, one of the best free webmaster tools to measure and track your website.
Would you like to make your website the best? If yes, then monitor the improvement of your site. Google Analytics (GA) is a golden digital marketing tool in measuring the success of any website you deal with. You can even measure sales and conversions.
It helps you to track all significant metrics related to your site, covering all aspects. You can monitor the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies, onsite content, user experience, and device functionality.
Most marketers use GA to –
- Evaluate the performance of marketing, content and products
- Check the insights to reach the right customers
- Identify which pages and links your visitors click the most
- Know whether the SEO campaign is directing traffic to correct pages
- Track the performance of keywords in content and how much traffic it brings
- Monitor the number of visitors coming and returning, their location
- Number of new visitors and how long they stay on your website
Know These Terms in the Google Analytics Glossary
For any marketers using Google Analytics, make sure you have a basic understanding of the key terms in this tool.
Here’s a list of important terms in the Google Analytics Glossary
- Acquisition
Acquisition reports help to provide insight on how people are finding your website. The tool offers dedicated reports on paid traffic from Google Ads, organic Google traffic, traffic from social as well as custom campaign tags.
- Bounce rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who left your site without any further action clicking around to other links or pages. This bounce rate also provides necessary insights on how your content performs.
- Calculated metric
With calculated metrics, you can create your own metrics based on the default metrics available within the reports. When it comes to cost-per-click (CPC), this calculated metric can be useful when there are multiple sessions per user and CPC isn’t accurate.
- Conversion
Conversion refers to the number of times users met your marketing goals, which means that they decided to make a purchase. However these goals vary from website to website just like requesting a quote, writing a review, subscribe to a newsletter or any. Each goal reports a maximum of one conversion per session while every transaction is reported.
- Cost-Per-Click
Seen in the Acquisition reports, cost-per-click (CPC) or pay per click (PPC) refers to visitors clicking through to your website from paid ads. From these Acquisition reports, you can evaluate how well you can benefit from CPC ads.
- Demographics
Demographics refer to user’s personal details such as age, gender. You can enable demographic data in Google Analytics’ settings – admin >> Tracking Info >> Data Collection >> Advertising Features.
- Direct traffic
Direct traffic refers to visitors coming directly to your website by typing in your URL in their browser. It may be either through bookmark or by clicking on a link in an email application.
- Ecommerce Conversion
When a visitor successfully purchases your product during a session, this is referred to as ecommerce conversion. This report helps monitor your website’s ecommerce activity.
- Google Signals
With Google Analytics signals you can understand the journey of your visitors across devices. By activating Google signals, site owners or marketers will be able to track the traffic coming to the website.
- Google Tag Manager
This GA tool helps managing different marketing snippets and other tags on your website. Before installation, it allows all tags to be tested on the site.
- Landing Page
This is the page the user sees, when they begin their visit to your site, in fact this is the page they ‘land’ on your site, via PPC ads. It need not be a home. Often professionals create customized landing pages for ads.
- Search Query
This is the term used by the visitor to click through to your website. Search terms used can be from Google organic search results or even from paid ads.
- Sessions
Sessions refer to the period of time a visitor is actively engaged on your site. Often the default session timeout is 30 minutes, during this time the user will be inactive on your website. Then a new session will be reported if they perform another interaction.
- Site Search
Site search is the term visitor type into the search bar on your website. From this report, you can get insights such as repeat searches, search categories and common pages visitors search for.
- Social Plugins
Social plugins report in Google Analytics allows tracking social interactions. This report helps to monitor people engaged with social sharing widgets embedded within your website, such as Facebook likes, Twitter Follows and more.