How to Explain to Your Boss About Google Analytics

Generally Explaining Google Analytics to Your Boss speaking, you'll find 2 main types of articles about Google Analytics: setup and reporting. In practice, users is a count of the number of unique products that access our website. Even more specifically, a unique internet browser on a unique device. Remember those cookies we talked about earlier? Each set of biscuits is a different user.

Consider your own digital life - how many computers/devices do you make use of during the day to access the internet? Work PC vs Home PERSONAL COMPUTER? Phone vs Laptop? Every different device counts as being a different user. There are ways to get this number to more accurately represent people instead of devices, but that requires additional setup and a situation where you know someone's actual identity (for instance if they log in to your site. )

Typically, this amount is higher than it should be. We have more users than actual people visiting the website plus some tracking issues will artificially increase this number. People can clear their biscuits and get new computers. They have still worth reporting upon, but be clear when talking about this particular metric.

Classes

A session is all of a wearer's activities on your site in just a given time period. If I come to your website and view five pages, that is all grouped into my one session. Remember that GA doesn't have the live camera feed to view someone browse your site, therefore there's really no way for it to know when a person leaves your site. It determines that a session is over after a consumer has been inactive for more than 30 minutes.

Each session gets attributed back to a specific channel in the Acquisition reports, so if someone arrives on our site from Social media or a Google search, all of the activity in that particular program gets credited to that particular approach. If they come back from a different source (or after half an hour of inactivity) then a brand new session is started.

This a great metric to track plus report on. We clearly want to see more sessions arriving at our site and sessions is a great indicator of exercise on the site.

Pageviews

This counts how many pages are viewed on the website, pretty easy right? For general reporting, 30 days over month, it's an OK metric to use to find out ups and downs. Keep in mind what it's really measuring though. If you have “hub" pages, like your homepage, exactly where people branch off from then return to frequently, your pageview numbers will go up, however, you haven't necessarily increased worth from those extra pageviews.

Typically, this number is higher than it should be, because it consists of multiples views of the exact same page, even during the exact same session. Use this as a standard month over month or year over year, but for more in-depth analysis, utilize the Unique Pageviews metric intended for individual pages.

Avg. Session Duration

One of the most misunderstood metrics, we'd ideally want Session Duration to be just that : how long did users on average spend on our site. Rather, you're reporting how much time we've measured that users spent on our site.