Analytics buzz words explained – and why number of sessions isn’t always the most important
An important part of effective SEO is data analysis, knowing who, what, when and where people are visiting your site. Google Analytics is a widely recognised and utilised tool to be able to gain insight into the performance of your website and looks at metrics such as ‘sessions’, ‘bounce rate’, ‘session duration’ and ‘pages per session’ to organise data.
But what do all of these words mean? And are they all equally important? At Austin Marketing we pride ourselves on being transparent and ensuring that our customers understand the reports they receive from us and don’t just take our word for it. We find that this approach helps us maintain trusted and effective relationships with our clients and allows us to build effective plans together to meet their business targets moving forward.
Sessions
This is simply the number of visits your website has received in a given amount of time. It can be easy to equate more sessions with more success but this isn’t always the case.
We focus on the quality of the traffic to your website rather than the sheer quantity. While more visitors to your site is a good thing, we need to make sure that as many of these visitors as possible are relevant and could be potential business for you.
Session Duration
This is the amount of time that a user on your website spends browsing before leaving. This can be a great indicator of user engagement and allows us to get an idea of which areas of the site are performing best and which ones could be improved.
Pages Per Session
Similarly, pages per session can be a good way to establish user engagement. This metric tells you on average how many pages on the website a user views before leaving. Again by looking at this figure we can gain a deeper insight into the behaviour of the website users.
Bounce Rate
Arguably the most important metric, the bounce rate is the percentage of users that leave the website immediately after arriving. High bounce rates can be indicative of spam activity, poor usability of the website, unengaging or irrelevant content etc.
It is this metric that is the biggest indicator of an improved website as it shows that the site is engaging, aesthetically pleasing and exactly what the visitor was looking for.
This is only a window into the plethora of information that Google Analytics can give us about your website. If you would like to know how your website is performing and how we can help improve it; why not get in touch with us for a free SEO report?