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

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

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

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

The Language report shows visitor data based on the language configured in the visitors’ operating system. That is important to keep in mind when using this report. Just because I have my operating system configured in American English does not necessarily mean I am visiting your site from the United States or that my native language is English. This is not a geographical report. Where it can be useful however, is in developing your site to meet your users’ needs and deciding where to put your marketing dollars. Do I have a large percentage of Spanish speaking visitors? Maybe French speakers come to my site in high numbers but bounce after viewing my landing page. Should I have a French version of my site?

Navigate to the language report from the menu on the left under the visitors heading. Your default view is going to be visits. But use the drop down box (1) to select a view that works for you and to compare metrics.

If you have goals set up be sure to gather insights from the goal conversion (2) tab. Do Japanese speakers (or those with their operating systems configured for Japanese) sign up for more newsletters or place items in their shopping cart more than English speakers? Maybe a newsletter geared towards that user’s language or products tailored for a Japanese market makes sense. Find the insights and use them to improve your users’ experiences on your site.

To help you use and understand this report better, here are few of the more common language codes:

de-at – German Austria
de – German Standard
el – Greek
en – English
en-ca – English Canada
en-gb – English United Kingdom
es – Spanish
fr-ca – French Canada
fr – French Standard
he – Hebrew
it – Italian Standard
ja – Japanese
ko – Korean
nl – Dutch Standard
pl – Polish
pt-br – Portuguese Brazil
pt – Portuguese Portugal
ru – Russian
zh-cn – Chinese PRC
zh-tw – Chinese Taiwan

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Trending – Visits

The New vs. Returning Visitor report does pretty much exactly what it says; shows you data for new visitors compared to returning visitors. The behavior of a new visitor can be quite different from that of a returning visitor. The insights gained from reviewing that data can be valuable for understanding your customers and tailoring your site to their needs.

The default view shows you Visits in a pie chart. But you can select other options from the drop down box (1) above the pie chart. Alternate views (2) such as a bar graph (2a) and comparison to site average (2b) are also available.

If you have goals and/or e-commerce (3) set up you have even more options to analyze your visitors.

In order to use this report effectively it will help to understand the distinction between these two types of visitors and some of the challenges associated with gathering 100% accurate data.

A visitor is recorded as a New Visitor when there has not been a cookie set for them previously.

They are recorded as a Returning Visitor when the cookie has already been set for them.

Simple enough, but there are a few things that could throw this off.

When you first install Google Analytics, ALL of your visitors will be new visitors. The cookies can’t be set until the GA code is installed and capturing data.  Keep that in mind before you worry that no one comes to your site more than once.

In addition, sometimes a returning visitor will get counted as a new visitor.

This is can happen when someone deletes their cookies or turns off cookies altogether.

Or, many people use multiple machines; a laptop in the living room, a desktop in the den and another computer at the office. They will often visit the same sites from each different machine.  But since cookies are machine and browser specific, that one person will be counted as new the first time they visit from each computer or if they use different browsers on the same machine.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Languages

The Visitor Map Overlay report shows you where your visitors are coming from, allowing you to analyze metrics by geography. This report uses the visitor’s IP address to pin-point their location. The data is typically quite accurate, but keep in mind that is may not always be available and a certain number of visitor locations will show as “not set,” meaning GA was not able to determine where they were coming from.

Navigate to this report from the menu on the left. The default view will be visits by country. Each country is color coded by density with the darker the color the higher the reported metric from that location. A density key is in the lower left corner of the map.

Roll your mouse over each country to view the exact metric for that location.

Change the metric displayed on the map by opening the menu in the upper left corner of the map and selecting a new metric.

In this example I selected the new metric of bounce rate and the map below reflects these rates.

To drill down into more detail for a specific country click on it and your map will change to that country by itself. Keep drilling down to a smaller region (such as a state) and finally down to city by clicking on the territory or region.

Keep in mind when viewing the Map Overlay reports that aggregate metrics can be a bit misleading. Notice how closely this visits map matches a basic population distribution map of the United States. It stands to reason that you will get more visits from highly populated states such as California and while North Dakota, with its smaller population, results in fewer visits.

Percentage or per-visit metrics can be much more useful. When looking at the Percent of New Visits on the map below, North Dakota has a very different story than on the map above.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – New vs. Returning

The Visitor Benchmark report allows you to see how your site is doing compared to other sites in the same category as you. In order for this feature of Google Analytics to work at its best site owners need to opt in to share their data. But don’t worry; the data is a collective of all sites that opt in. Your personal site data will not be viewable by anyone else.

Navigate to this report from the menu on the left.

The default view shows you several metrics compared to all sites of a similar size.

To make more specific comparisons open the category list and compare your metrics against sites in your same category by selecting the category that matches your business and clicking the “select category” button.

Comparing your data against others in your category and similar sites can help you understand it better and even gain some insights. But remember the benchmarking data is only as good as the number of people sharing their data. The more that share the better the data becomes.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Map Overlay

The Visitor Overview Report presents a snapshot of who is visiting you site and how long they are staying. It is essentially a beefed up hit counter that gives you a high level view of your site stats. But remember to drill down and compare date ranges to search out those useful insights.

Navigate to this report from the menu on the left.

From the visitor overview screen select the date range you want to view. The data displayed includes such things as visits, pageviews, time on site, and bounce rate.

For better insight use the date comparison feature and see how one time period is performing compared to a previous period.

Be sure to note that there is a difference between visit and visitor. Google Analytics measures both.  A visit is the individual session initiated by the visitor, or person.  If that visitor is inactive for 30 minutes or more or if they leave your site and return after 30 minutes their next session will be counted as a new visit but the same visitor.  In the examples above 251,213 visitors made 327,057 visits to this site.  Meaning some people came more than once.

Here are a few more definitions that will be helpful when viewing your reports:

Unique Visitors – Determined by cookies, this is the number of visitors that have not been to your site before.  Keep in mind that things such as deleting cookies, using different computers or browsers and multiple people using the same computers can skew these numbers somewhat.

Pageviews – Each instance of the browser loading a page.  For Google Analytics this is each time the tracking code is loaded by your browser.

Bounce Rate – A one-page visit.  In other words, a visitor comes to your site, views one page, then leaves from the same page they landed on without going to any others.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Benchmarking

The final option available for sharing reports through Google Analytics is to email them. This can be done from within any of the reports with a simple click of a button and a few steps to set things up. As with most everything in GA, you have several options for emailing your reports; send it now, schedule it for future or repeated emailing or add it to an email you already have set up.

To access any of these options start by clicking the email button at the top of the report you wish to send.

Send Now:

Click the Email button then complete the information on the “Send Now” tab.
Send to others: Who do you want this report to go to? Fill in the recipients separated by commas. If you want to receive a copy be sure to select the “send to me” box.
Subject: Give the email a name so people are sure to open it and read the reports.
Description: Not required, but it gives your recipients an idea of what they are getting.
Format: Select from PDF, XML, CSV or TSV. The report will be in an attachment in the format you select.
Word verification: Need to make sure you are human.
Send: Click on the send button and you are done.

Schedule:

Click the Email button then complete the information on the “Schedule” tab.
The steps are the same as the Send Now option above up through the format step.
After that you have the option to select your date range and emailing schedule. If you want to include a date comparison check the box. Then click the schedule button.

Add to Existing:

Once you have set up one or more scheduled reports you can then add more reports through the Add to Existing tab. Check the email you would like to add the new report to and click the Add Report button.

Deleting or Changing Scheduled Reports:

If you no longer need a scheduled report to be sent out or need to change a report removing or changing it is simple. From the Settings menu on the left select the email option.

From this screen you can manage scheduled emails. Click on the email name to change it or on the trash can icon to the right to delete it.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Overview