Acquisition
Acquisition measures which channels brought users to your site, using the traffic source (name of the platform) and the medium (organic or paid or campaign name).
An example would be someone who visited the site from a Google search (source) and clicked on an organic search result (medium).
Average session duration
The measurement of time spent on a site is the average session duration. It is calculated by how many sessions the site had and how long users were on the site.
This metric helps to understand if your audience is engaging with the site and finding the information and content useful or not.
Bounce
A bounce indicates when a person visits the site but only views a single page.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions with only single-page views. Bounce rate helps you understand the quality of content on your site.
People often misinterpret bounce rate as being wrong if itis too high and good if too low. Without the context of data around it, however, the opportunities for inaccuracy are common.
Channel
Channels in analytics are high-level categories showing how people found your site. Examples of the high-level categories would be organic search (Google Search), paid search (advertising via Google Ads), social (people visiting from social media platforms like Facebook), referral (a website or platform referring people to your site via a link), and email (an email newsletter or campaign with a link to your site).
These are existing channel sources within Google Analytics and other tools, but you can create custom channels depending on your data collection requirements.
Click-through rate
Click-through rate is the percentage of clicks against the number of views or impressions on an ad or search result.
Conversion or goal completion
Conversions are the measurement of the number of desired actions (or goals) completed by online users. For example, a conversion could be a sale on your site or a form being populated and submitted to your Sales team.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of leads or sales against the number of visitors — if you have ten conversions per 100 visits, the conversion rate would be 10%.
CPC
CPC is Cost-per-click. It is a measure for paid media campaigns within Google Ads or on relevant social media campaigns. CPC measures how much it costs for each click on a paid advert. We calculate the average cost-per-click by dividing the amount of budget spent on each click (to display the ad online) by the number of clicks on a paid advert.
Dimensions and metrics
Metrics are the quantitative measurements of data. Dimensions are labels. For example, The channel (organic search) would be the dimension, while the number of users from the channel would be the metric.
Google Tag Manager
Google tag manager (GTM) is a tool used to implement various tracking codes on a website. Instead of adding every tracking code to the site, GTM is the single point of entry. A GTM code is added to the site, and then the required tracking codes are added to the site via tags on GTM.
Interactions per visit
These are actions your users took when visiting your website. Tracking this metric will provide a clearer understanding of how many interactions visitors take and what these interactions are. This is known as the ‘path to purchase’ or, more traditionally, the buyer’s journey.
New vs. returning
This is the net percentage of new visitors to your site compared with the total number of returning visitors.
Pageviews
Pageviews are measured by the number of times your tracking code is loaded from your page loading in user browsers.
Sessions
Sessions are a single visit to your site with multiple interactions. These interactions would be pageviews, conversions, and actions. A typical session times out, by default, after 30 minutes.
Traffic
Also known as visits, traffic is the total number your site receives in a given period.
Traffic by device
‘Traffic by device’ is the total number of page or site visits to a site by device type, e.g., tablet, desktop, or smartphone.
Visitors
Visitors are internet users who visit your site; they can be tracked by browser cookies and a GTM tracking code installed on your site.