Besides conquering galaxies and cooking your breakfast, did you know that one of the many benefits of your Rock Paper Simple website is real-time analytics? Thanks to tools like Google Analytics measuring certain metrics, we can help you to understand how well your site is performing. You’ll be able to make decisions to not only improve the user’s experience, but also improve your business’ sales.
If you’re unfamiliar with an analytics report and its terms, it can be overwhelming and kind of confusing. Fear not! Unless you’re working in the digital marketing industry and immersed in it daily, don’t feel bad. Whether you’re a small business owner or completely new to web analytics in general, there is a basic understanding of web analytics you can learn to help you along. And the more you understand the terminology, the more confident you will be in making improvements to your site’s performance.
Here are some of the top terms you should know when it comes to web analytics:
Bounce Rate: the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then navigate to another domain after viewing one page.
Click Through: when a visitor clicks on a link that leads them to a website or another section within a website. The click through rate is the number of clicks a link received divided by the number of times your link is shown expressed as a percentage.
Conversion: a visitor responds to a call to action (i.e. purchases a product).
Cookie: a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in the visitor’s web browser. Cookies keep track of a visitor’s movements within the site, remembers the visitor’s registered login, theme selection, preferences, and other customization functions.
Direct Referral: URL’s the visitor either typed in directly or reached via their browser’s bookmarks. They did not find your website on search engines or through another site.
Entry Page: the first page a visitor views on a website from another domain.
Exit Page: the last page a visitor views before leaving the website.
Impression: the number of times a piece of content (i.e. banner ad, social media post) is viewed.
Keyword: a particular word or phrase that summarizes the content of a page and helps search engines match pages with searches.
Organic Search: visitors arrive to your website from unpaid organic or natural search engine results.
Pageviews: a pageview is recorded when the visitor views a full page of your website. Pageviews per visit is the average number of pages viewed per visit over a selected period of time.
Paid Referrals: visits that came to your website from paid advertisements (i.e. Google AdWords.)
PPC: also known as pay per click, PPC are paid searches where the advertiser pays based on the number of clicks the advertisement received.
Referral: visitors who were referred from links on other websites.
Social Referrals: referrals from social sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Top Viewed Pages: pages with the most views over a selected period of time.
Unique Visitor: a number of distinct individuals who request pages from a website during a specific period, no matter how many times they visit.
By taking the time to learn these web analytic terms, you have the power to make your Website work better for you and your visitors. And like we say here at Rock Paper Simple, “Keep It Simple!” There’s no need to bend over backwards and drain your time and resources when our team can help you. Give us a call at 321-626-2172 and learn how we can help!
