SEO Reports - Traffic Metrics Explained

Apr

At Distinctly Digital, we use Google Analytics to track the success of our work with clients' websites. On a monthly basis we send reports detailing analysis of traffic metrics as well as an update of keyword ranking positions. This article is to clarify all the metrics we report on, where possible as defined by Google themselves:

Visits - The number of times your visitors has been to your site (unique sessions initiated by all your visitors). If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

Page Views - The total number of Page Views for your site when applied over the selected dimension.

Bounce Rate - The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). As a rule of thumb, the lower this is the better.

Unique Visitors – A unique visitor is one person who has come to a website in a specified time period (30 days for Google Analytics). If one person comes to a website 5 times during a week they will only be counted as 1 unique visitor.

Direct Visitors - Visitors that have entered your URL into the browser or followed a bookmark. If Google analytics cannot understand the source of traffic, the software defaults to direct traffic.

Referring Site Visitors - Referring sites are websites that have a link to your website on theirs. Visitors have to click on one of these links to be counted as a referring site visitor.

Search Engine Visitors – Visitors who reach your website via a search engine such as Google or Yahoo.

Paid Visitors – Visitors that have accessed your website via pay per click marketing (PPC).

Unpaid Search Engine Visits – Visitors who access your website via the unpaid (natural/organic) search engine listings. It is this metric that is best used to measure the success of a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

For definitions of other terms used by Google Analytics, please refer to this URL: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99118