Your essential website stats glossary

Website stats are one of those things many people mean to get their heads around when they’ve got time; time that a lot of people just don’t have. With almost every business feeling the effects of covid-19, many are turning to websites and social media for their communications and customer orders in these challenging times. Websites across the board are seeing a surge in traffic and online enquiries, but do you know how engagement with your site has changed over the last few weeks?

If you have a website, chances are you have some form of customer tracking, like Google Analytics, on it (and if you don’t, make sure you give us a call!). So our web design team have put together a list of some common website stats and what they mean.

Sessions

Essentially, this is the number of visits your website receives. Every time someone comes to your website, regardless of what they do there, it’s classed as a session. So if that person, or user, leaves your site and returns a few days later, this is counted as another ‘session’.

Users

This is the number of people who have visited your website. Each individual person is classed as a user, so if a customer visits your website three times in a month, they will be recorded as one user (with three sessions). This data can be a little bit inaccurate if people clear their cookies or use a private browser, but it’s a good indication of how many people are using your website.

New users

A new user is someone that is recorded as having visited your website for the first time. Again, this isn’t an exact science, as people who have visited your site on their mobile will be recorded as a new user if they later visit from a desktop, but it’s a good indication of what percentage of your website visitors are returning to your site versus those who are brand new customers.

Bounce rate

Users who land on your site and immediately leave again without visiting any other pages will be considered a bounce. Your bounce rate is the percentage of total sessions that record only a one-page visit. A very low bounce rate is generally considered to be anything under about 20%, while a high bounce rate is 80% or higher.

Landing page

A landing page is just that; where people “land” on your website. For most people, their most popular landing page is their homepage.

Exit page

Exit pages are the pages where people leave your site. If someone is on your contact page, jots down your phone number and closes down your site, the contact page will be their exit page. Exit pages can be helpful in identifying problem areas on your website.

Filters

If you work in an organisation with lots of staff, you may already be using filters. These let you view website activity without surplus data, such as staff or spam traffic, that might skew your numbers.

Goals

If you want users to take any action on your site – making a purchase or submitting an enquiry form for example – you need to be using goals. As the name implies, goals are the ultimate actions you want people to take on your website. Once these are set up, every successful action on your site will be recorded as a goal completion.

Conversion rate

Once a goal is completed by a user, this is counted as a conversion. That visitor has now been converted to a customer or at least a potential one. Your conversion rate is the percentage of total site sessions which result in a goal completion. If you have multiple goals set up this can be the total sum of all your goals or per goal. It just depends on what you want to measure.

Acquisition

Acquisition is simply how your site acquires its visitors; where they came from. This section is really important if you run online ads. Acquisition data tells you which channels are bringing the most people to your website and, if you have goals set up, which is generating the most income.

If you’d like to have a chat with our team about your website stats or tracking set-up, get in touch!