The following is a glossary of terms used throughout the Google Analytics reports provided to organizations contributing collections to the Minnesota Digital Library.
Audience Overview Report
Visits
Visits represent the total number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site during the given reporting period.
If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity is attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session.
Unique Visitors
The first visit by a user during the reporting period is counted as a unique visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits. They are not counted as additional unique visitors.
Pageviews
Pageviews represents the total number of pages viewed on your site during the reporting period.
Pages / Visit
Pages / Visit provides an average of the number of pages viewed per user visit.
Average Visit Duration
Average Visit Duration refers to the average length of time all users to your site spend visiting your collection pages.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your collection. A single-page visit occurs when a user comes to your site and only visits one page before exiting the site completely.
New Visitor vs. Returning Visitor
New visitors are users who are visiting your site for the first time during the given reporting period. Returning visitors refers to users who have visited your site multiple times during the given reporting period. The pie chart shown on the report provides a visual comparison of these two user types.
City
Allows you to see the top ten cities from where visits originated. City location may not be accurate for visits from mobile devices.
Also provided in this section report is the number of visits associated with each city or origin as well as the percentage of total visits that number represents.
- Sample Audience Overview Report (PDF; 204 KB)
- Audience Overview Report Tutorial (2:35)
Pages Report
Page Title
Lists all pages viewed by visitors to this site during the defined reporting period, sorted by number of pageviews from highest to lowest. Page title is taken from the contents of the <title> tags in the page level HTML and usually refers to the title of the collection object being viewed.
Pageviews
Pageviews represents the total number of times the page listed in the table was viewed during the reporting period.
Average Time on Page
Refers to the average amount of time spent on the page listed in the table.
Entrances
Entrances identify the number of times that the page listed in the table was the first one visited during a session.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your collection. A single-page visit occurs when user comes to your site and only visits one page before exiting the site completely.
In this report the Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visits to the specific page listed in the table which resulted in a single pageview.
% Exit
Refers to the percentage of times that the page listed in the table was the last page viewed by the user before exiting the site.
Page Value
This metric is used principally in supporting e-commerce transaction values for commercial sites. As such, this metric can be ignored by participants of the MDL.
- Sample Pages Report (PDF; 204 KB)
- Pages Report Tutorial (2:58)
Referral Traffic Report
Source
Refers to other websites that are directly driving traffic to your collection. This report highlights the top referring sources to your site for a given reporting period.
Visits
Visits represent the total number of individual sessions that were directed to your collection through the website source listed in the table.
Pages / Visit
Pages / Visit provides the average number of pages viewed per user visit as directed from the source listed in the table.
Average Visit Duration
Refers to the average length of time all users to your site that came in through the source listed in the table spent visiting your collection pages.
% New Visits
The percent of visits that came in through the source listed in the table that were new to the site (as opposed to being a returning visitor) for the reporting period.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your collection. A single-page visit occurs when user comes to your site and only visits one page before exiting the site completely.
In this report the Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visits coming from the source listed in the table that resulted in a single pageview.
- Sample Referral Traffic Report (PDF; 185 KB)
- Referral Traffic Report Tutorial (3:00)