Everyone today knows the word “traffic” is not limited to only cars in a gridlock. Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. But a closer look reveals additional vocabulary to web traffic like visits, pageviews, bounce rate, avg time on site and % of new visitors. All sounds pretty self explanatory but a deeper understanding allows you to decipher your web audience.
The online analytic site leading the pack is Google Analytics where you take a simple code provided by google and you place it on your website to monitor traffic. Your Google Analytics dashboard is a graph which shows the number of daily traffic youâre site had over a 30-day period. Visits are different then Page Views where Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site and a Page View is a view of a page on your site. You might have 1 visit but 20 page views because the visitor viewed 20 pages of your site.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits that left your site the minute it entered your site. A high Bounce Rate generally indicates that your site was not what the visitor was looking for, (sad face). The Average Time On Site also is way of measuring visitor satisfaction. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, time on site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your site.
% of new visitors is also a bit tricky. A high number of new visitors suggests that you are successful at driving traffic to your site while a high number of return visitors suggests that the site content is engaging enough to keep visitors coming back. However if you have new visits as 1 and return visits as 1000, that means most likely you are the only one going back to your site daily.
Understanding the analytics of your site allows you to be more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. If you pay attention to the numbers when you create a new blog post or add a new product, you can start to understand what your audience is attracted to and what doesn’t get any love.