Audience Overview

The Audience reports help you to understand the demographics, behaviors, and technologies of your visitors.

• Is your audience made up of new visitors (people who had never been to your site before) or of visitors who come back to the site regularly?
• Where do your best customers live?
• Should you consider offering your site content in additional languages?
• Does your site function properly for all visitors?
• What paths do visitors take through your site?

Traffic Overview

How do people find your site? Use the Traffic Sources section to evaluate the effectiveness of your referrals, direct traffic, organic (unpaid) search keywords, and custom campaigns. When evaluating the effectiveness of a traffic source, consider the following metrics:

• To measure how actively the visitors are engaging with your site and content:
  Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, Bounce Rate
• To measure conversion effectiveness:
  Goal Conversion Rate, Per Visit Goal Value
• To measure ecommerce effectiveness:
  Revenue, Ecommerce Conversion Rate, Per Visit Value

About Traffic Sources

Source: Every referral to a web site has an origin, or source. Possible sources include: “google” (the name of a search engine), “facebook.com” (the name of a referring site), “spring_newsletter” (the name of one of your newsletters), and “direct” (visits from people who typed your URL directly into their browser, or who had bookmarked your site).

Medium: Every referral to a website also has a medium. Possible medium include: “organic” (unpaid search), “cpc” (cost per click, i.e. paid search), “referral” (referral), “email” (the name of a custom medium you have created), “none” (direct visits have a medium of “none”).

Keyword: The keywords that visitors searched are usually captured in the case of search engine referrals. This is true for both organic and paid search. If the a visitor is signed in to a Google account, however, Keyword will have the value “(not provided)”.

Campaign is the name of the referring AdWords campaign or a custom campaign that you have created.

Content identifies a specific link or content item in a custom campaign. For example, if you have two call-to-action links within the same email message, you can use different Content values to differentiate them so that you can tell which version is most effective.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that see only one page during a visit to your site. There are a number of reasons why you might have a high bounce rate. The following items cover some issues that can contribute to a high bounce rate.

Single-Page Sites
If you have only one page on your site (a blog, for example), Google Analytics doesn't register multiple pageviews unless visitors reload that page. As a result, single-page sites tend to have high bounce rates.

Site Design
Visitors might leave your site from the entrance page in response to site design or usability issues. Optimizing those pages so they correlate better with the search terms that bring users to your site, with ads you're running, or with keywords you've purchased.

User Behavior
Other factors may be solely attributed to the visitor's behavior. For example, if a user bookmarks a page on your site, visits it, and leaves, then that's considered a bounce.

The average duration of visits (sessions) to your site for the month. Session time is calculated by adding up time on page for each page in the session except for the last page in the session. The average time on site is determined by dividing the total time on site by the number of sessions for the month.

The more time spent, the more successful you are in achieving you communication objectives. When users spend more time, they become more engaged, and your success rate goes up accordingly.