Decoding Google Analytics – Site Visitors
If you have upgraded your free website you now have the ability to track all your site traffic with Google Analytics. Ten years ago you would have had to pay really big bucks to get the kind of detailed reporting that Google offers today for free.
For many beginners it’s a really good thing that Google Analytics is free because there is so much information many newbies simply are overwhelmed when it comes to making heads or tails out of the data.
When a Visitor Is Not Counted As a Visitor
First of all, let’s start with a definition of visitor and visits.
A visitor is a unique individual who arrives on your site. In other words the number of visitors is the actual number of human beings that have paid your site a visit. If the same visitor comes to your site more than once in the reporting period he or she will only be counted once as a visitor.
So what’s up with that? If somebody really likes the site and visits 5 times during the reporting period why isn’t he or she counted? Isn’t knowing how much traffic you get important in determining if your site is successful?
Of course it is and your unique visitor’s “visits” are counted and included in your traffic data. And that brings us to the definition of a visit. A visit is defined as anytime anyone, unique or not, lands on your site. When you look at the traffic trend at the top of your Analytics dashboard what you are seeing is a graph of the number of visits (not visitors) that your site received during the reporting period.
Are You Popular or Just A One Night Stand
Knowing how many visits you received and what percentage of them were from unique or repeat visitors can give you an insight into how your website is performing to meet your goals. For example if you make a website to promote a “one time” product like a book or CD, then you are interested in getting as many unique visitors as possible so you would expect that the “new visits” percentage would be high.
If on the other hand, you are trying to develop a relationship with the visitor so that they consider your site as a “go to” source for your product or service, you would hope to see a steady upward trend in total visits but you would also want to see the “new visits” stat to be on the low side like 50% to 60%. A low “new visits” percentage means people are coming back to your site more than once during the reporting period.
Local Businesses Take Note
If you have a local business then there is another excellent tracking feature provided by Google regarding visits. On the right hand side of the visitor overview section you’ll see Visitor Segmentation and then Map Overlay. Clicking on the map overlay will take you to the global view and at the top there is a link to the city view. Clicking on that link will list the cities where the traffic originated.
If the bulk of the visits are coming from other than your home town it may mean you have to do some more on page optimization to take advantage of Google’s “local results” policies. If however, everything works as planned and your traffic is mostly local, you can click on the city name and it will give you the details on the visits. This is particularly helpful if you ran a special campaign as you can see when or if visits spiked as a result of that campaign.
If you don’t care where the visits are coming from but you notice that one or two cities are making up the bulk of the visits, then your product or service probably resonates well with the people who live there. For example if you had a surfing product and your visits were coming from Malibu and Oahu then you might consider adding some content with those cities specifically mentioned to grab all the inquiries from those towns.
So to recap, a visitor is a unique human being and a visit is any time anyone, unique or returning, lands on the site. Understanding how your visits are trending month to month, where your visitors live and how many new visitors compared to returning visitors you get are all essential in tweaking your site for optimal performance.
