One thing most of us want to know about our site is how long people are visiting.  Have we managed to capture their attention and keep them engaged for hours on end or are they coming in, looking around and leaving after only a few seconds?  Depending on the nature of your site either option may be acceptable.  But we can work to improve the user experience knowing this information.  As we discussed earlier, the Time on Site report under Visitor Trending will give you an average amount of time visitors spend on your site. But one important factor to keep in mind is that averages sometimes lie, or at the very least do not always present the whole picture. Visitor Loyalty reports on the other hand are “bucketized.” Meaning every visitor or visit must fall into a particular category. So it may present a more realistic picture of your data.

Take a look at the Time on Site and Length of Visit reports side by side to get a better understanding of the bucket concept.

For the time period of December 14,2008 to December 20,2008 we see that the average time on site was 1 minutes and 45 seconds.

But now look at the Length of Visit report. This paints a different picture. 70.09% of our visits lasted 10 seconds or less. Those visits in the 60 to 600 second range skew the average a bit.

The “bucketized” views offered in the Visitor Loyalty reports can help use better understand the numbers we are seeing.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Depth of Visit

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small

Up next in the Visitor Loyalty Reports is the Recency report. This one is very simple and straight to the point. The report data is presented in a bar graph and shows you the frequency of repeat visits to your site.

Once you set your date range the Recency report will show you the total number of visits during that period broken down by the number of days since the last visit. Google Analytics is using a cookie to calculate the last time a visit to your site was made from that computer and browser. That cookie is kept for 24 months or until the user deletes their cookies.

In the above example the majority of this site’s visits were made 0 days ago (98,690 visits or 80.45% of all visitors). Zero days ago means that visitor has not been to your site within the time period that GA cookie is stored (18 months). The last category, “365+ days ago” means the visitor last visited between 365 days and 24 months when the cookie drops off.

The data in the Recency report can be a gauge of how interested visitors are in your site and/or product based on the frequency of their visits.  Keep in mind that the data in this and other Visitor Loyalty reports is “bucketized” meaning that all visits must fit into one of the predefined buckets or categories.  When you are searching for insights to improve your users’ experience be sure you are looking at data in context.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Length of Visit

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small

Using the Visitor and Visitor Trending reports we now know a bit about our visitors; where they are coming from, how many of them there are and what they are doing on our site. While we don’t want the stream of new visitors to dry up, returning visitors can present a great value depending on the nature of your site. These are your Loyal visitors, the ones who come back more than once and hopefully time and time again. The next set of reports under Visitors presents data on the loyalty of your visitors.

The first of these reports is Loyalty. It is a pretty straight forward bar graph that shows how many times visitors came to your site during the defined time period and what percentage of all visitors during that time came for a given number of times.

In the above example the majority of this site’s visitors came 1 time (30.78%). But this site also had a good showing of repeat visitors with 10.76% coming 26-50 times during a one month period. Compare that to the site below. 96.88% of their visitors only came one time during this time period. That may not be a bad thing depending on the goal of your site.

Sites that update their content often, such as blogs, news sites and the like are more likely to have visitors come back again and again. If you want to keep them coming back again and again, give them a reason to with fresh content.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Recency

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small

The last three reports in the Visitor Trending section can be classified as user engagement reports. Meaning, the metrics provided in the Average Pageviews, Time on Site, and Bounce Rate reports will give you a good idea of how involved in your site users become. This set of reports will answer the following questions about your visitors:

1) How many pages did they look at?
2) How long did they stay?
3) How many people came, saw one page and left (i.e. bounced away)?

Average Pageviews
This is the number of pages viewed per visit. This metric is a way of measuring visit quality. A high average pageviews suggests the visitor was highly engaged with your site and you are receiving targeted traffic. But a low average pageviews does not necessarily mean your site is not relevant to its visitors. A sports news site might have the day’s scores posted on the homepage giving the visitor exactly what they were looking for with one pageview. You satisfied your visitor with one pageview giving them what they wanted, but maybe you can entice them to stay and visit other pages giving them something they didn’t know they were missing out on. These metrics are not absolute.

In this example the average visitor views 5.67 pages per visit.

Time on Site
This is the average amount of time a visitor spends on your site during their visit. It is measured down to the second. It is also often used as a measure of site quality assuming the longer a visitor spends on your site the more engaged they are with it. However users sometimes leave a site open in their browser and move on to other things or walk away. Use this metric in conjunction with others to get the full picture.

In this example the average Time on Site was 5 minutes and 1 second.

Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits. In other words, a visitor left your site from the same page they entered on without viewing any other pages. It is generally assumed that a high bounce rate means users are not finding what they want on the entrance page so they leave in search of it elsewhere. This may be true in most cases, but make sure you are looking at it in context. If you offer a free software trial download from your homepage and the visitor downloads it and leaves to install it and test it out, you have accomplished a goal. If that is the case, other metrics such as new vs. returning visitors might be more useful to you.

In this example 28.64% of visitors visited one page and left.

The keys to measuring visitor engagement using these reports is to keep things in context and not let any one report be the sole basis of decision making.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Loyalty

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small

A pageview is when a visitor views a page of your site causing the page to be loaded by the browser. A single visitor can have multiple pageviews. In addition, if a visitor reloads a page or leaves a page and returns those will be counted as additional pageviews. From an Analytics standpoint a pageview is logged each time the tracking code is executed. The Visitor Trending section of the menu on the left of your Google Analytics screen contains the Pageviews report.

The Pageview report is pretty straight forward. As with other reports, you can compare the data to previous time periods; view it by hour, day, week or month; and e-mail or export it to share with others in your organization.

In the example above we can see that for the time period selected (Nov 9, 2008 – Nov 15, 2008) 468,456 pages of our site were viewed. This doesn’t tell us much about which pages are being viewed or how many pages each visitor views on average. But some insights can still be found. The graph indicates that mid-week tends to see higher pageviews. Is this significant to our site or our business? More analysis and data is probably needed, but pageviews is another report available to help improve your users’ experiences on your site.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Trending – User Engagement Reports

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small

The next report in the Visitor Trending section is Absolute Unique Visitors.  An absolute unique visitor is one what has not been to your site before during a specified time period, as determined by cookies. Keep in mind there are other factors such as deleting cookies, multiple computers and browsers used by one person and multiple people using the same computer, which can influence the accuracy of visitor reports. As long as we understand these nuances, we’ll understand what we’re looking at, and most importantly, we use Analytics to analyze trends.  Remember no analytics solution is 100% accurate, and they’ll all be either over or under the true values.  Looking at data trends over time minimizes this effect.

This report, found under Visitor Trending in the left side menu, counts visitors to your website during the selected date range.  In this report Google is counting each “unique” visitor to your site just one time each for the selected date range.  One count per person.

An example should help clarify this report.

Fred views your site once a day for a week. Unfortunately he is your only visitor that week.

You view the Absolute Unique Visitors report for that week in Google Analytics and you have 1 Absolute Unique Visitor (Fred).

He may have come 7 times, but each person is only counted once (assuming Fred kept clear of the Delete Cookies button). The other 6 times Fred is a returning visitor, but that is the new vs. returning visitor report. So your report would show one absolute unique visitor for the week you are viewing.

The next week Fred has told his friend Mary about your site and she visits on Sunday. Fred loves it so much he has come back again every day.

This time when you view the report for this week alone, you will see 2 Absolute Unique Visitors. Even though between them they had a total of 8 visits, they were each unique visitors for only one of those visits.

To recap, the Absolute Unique Visitors report is going to provide you with the number of individual visitors that have visited your site during a given time period regardless of the number of times they have visited. It is important to remember that this is specific to the date range you set for the report.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Trending – Pageviews

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small

A successful website means knowing your visitors. How are they getting to your site? What are they doing once they are there? When and why are they leaving? Are they satisfied with the results of their visit? We have already seen some of the reports available in Google Analytics that help you answer these questions: the visitor overview, benchmarking, and map overlay. But wait…there is still more! In the Visitor Reports section you will find the Visitor Trending reports. This section contains 6 additional reports – Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, and Bounce Rate – to help you find insightful bits of information about your visitors. They may not be the flashiest GA reports, but they are necessary nonetheless.

These reports also provide one added feature that the reports we have discussed so far do not – the ability to view data by hour. I’ll show where this can be useful in a bit.

Visits is the first of the Visitor Trending reports. Navigate to it from the menu on the left under the Visitors/Visitor Trending heading. Your default view is going to be visits by day for the last 30 days (not counting today remember). This can be useful to see how different days of the week impact visits. Are Mondays your big days? Or does a good portion of your traffic come over the weekends? Look for patterns and insights and tailor your site to how your visitors are using it. If Wednesday consistently sees large numbers maybe that is the day to announce new products or offer that blowout special. Remember to use the date comparison feature and when making comparisons be sure you are looking at the same day of the week (Wednesday vs. Wednesday).

As I mentioned earlier, one unique feature in the Visitor Trending reports is the ability to view data by hour. Select the clock icon in the “Graph by:” section just above your top graph. This breaks your visits/day view down hour by hour allowing you to determine which times of day are most active on your site. Why would you want to know this? It can be useful for several purposes.
• Find your lowest traffic times to schedule site maintenance and upgrades.
• Optimize your ad budget by determining when are the best times to start and stop ads.
• Plan promotions around the busiest times of day.
One thing to keep in mind however, is where are your visitors coming from. Are you pretty consistent in one region or time zone or are you receiving considerable visitors from various time zones, the US and Australia for example? The map overlay report can be helpful here and segmenting visitors by region into separate profiles can be beneficial.

Something to keep in mind: A Google Analytics session lasts 30 minutes. So if a visitor walks away from their computer for 31 minutes or more or closes the browser, and comes back to your site they start a new visit.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Trending – Absolute Unique Visitors

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Mike Small
Mike Small leads the SEM and paid search efforts at WebShare. You can find out more about Mike here.

See more posts by Mike Small