Website Analytics

Here’s a break down of Analytics and what they mean to you:

• Visits (or Sessions):  a number of times your page has been hit from the same uniquely identified visitor by a set period of time of 30 minutes.
• Page views: occurs whenever a browser loads your site. Therefore, one visitor can generate many page views. All page views are counted no matter how many times a user has visited the website. Page Views are a much better measurement of a website’s activity. Page Views are a measure of how humans, not computers, are interacting with your website. For example, if the site has 10,000 users and 20,000 sessions, it means that on average the users visited the site twice a month.
• Unique Visitors: refers to a person who has visited the website at least once and is counted only even though they may have hit the same page multiple times.
• Returning Visitors: on a very basic level, return visitors are users who have been to your site before. This number is important, as this shows interest from that user for your site.  Ideally, returning visitors to your site should be around 30% average, 50% is good. Every visitor to a website generates a unique random number, and a first timestamp, which combines to create their User ID, and allows their visits to the site to be tracked. 
• Bounce rate – the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.  An average bounce rate is 41-55%, depending on what the intent is for the page.  If you want the user to jump off immediately, then a higher bounce rate would be expected, vs. if you want the users to stay on the page longer for the content this number would be lower.
• Entry page – the first page that a visitor arrives at on a website from another domain.
• Exit page – the last page that a visitor accesses during a visit before leaving a website.