Google Analytics and your own WordPress Statistics (available through Jetpack, if you’re self-hosted) can be among the most useful book marketing tools. Who visits you and which pages do they frequent the most? Do people find what they’re looking for? How long do they stay?

This is the kind of questions that a simple analysis of your traffic can answer. However, it’s easy enough to get lost among all the jargon. Page views, unique visitors, visits, pages per session… it’s enough to give anyone a headache!

Thankfully, ConnextDigital recently published an Infographic which can serve as the perfect cheatsheet. Bookmark this page and refer to it whenever you wish to remind yourself what bounce rate is and why it matters, or refer to the original post for even more marketing information.

A Useful Web Analytics Glossary

Let’s take a look at what each of the terms found here mean:

AdWords measurements

When you connect Google Analytics to your Google Ads account, you’ll be able to measure how your online ad campaigns are performing. Using metrics like cost-per-click (CPC) and clickthrough rate (CTR), you can track how well they’re doing and whether or not they’re bringing you the traffic you need.

Average duration rate

This metric indicates the average time your visitors spend on your website. The more time they stay, the higher the chances your website has what it takes to keep them from leaving. Both bounce rate and average duration rate can tell you about how engaging your content is.

Bounce rate

When people ‘bounce’ off your website, this means they’ve landed on it but decided to leave, perhaps after realizing they’re in the wrong place or they don’t like what they saw. Ideally, the lower the number, the better for your stats. A healthy bounce rate should not be above 70% – 80%.

Pages per session

When a user views the pages on your website, this tallies under pages per session. The more pages per session means users are more engaged and want to explore your website. This is an indication that your website’s content ties in well together and is generally relevant to your target audience’s interests.

Page views

When a visitor lands on your site or even loads one of your pages, this action generates a page view. Take note that this counts regardless of who visits or how many times they’ve been there. This may seem like a bad metric for measuring traffic, but returning visitors are always welcome. Some just really care about those valuable first-timers.

Percentage of new visits

If you want to know the percentage of traffic that comes from first-time visitors, this is the metric you need to keep your eye on. You’d want this to be high if you’re looking for new prospects. But if you’re looking for repeat visitors, the number will most likely be lower.

Real-time traffic

Here, you’ll be able to see how many visitors are currently on your site at any given time, making this metric particularly handy when you’ve launched a promotion and want to see if it’s making an immediate effect.

Social media analytics

Social media has proven to be a useful channel for funneling traffic to websites. To find out if your social media efforts are driving traffic and which networks perform better, this is the right tool for you. To strike the right balance, you should aim for about 50% of traffic to come from social, and the other half from your organic efforts.

Unique visitors

This is one of the most important stats for measuring brand awareness. But if a particular user comes to the site every day, it only counts as one unique visit. This metric will tell you if you’re growing your customer/audience base by driving new unique visits.

Visits

A visit is a single browsing session and counts the number of website visits regardless of the pages viewed. So, when a user lands anywhere on your website, that counts as one visit. But a single user can be responsible for multiple visits if they leave your site and return after more than 30mins (or however long your session refresh period is).