So one of the things to keep in mind when you’re, looking at whether it’s Google Analytics or any other kind of measurement of your of your web presence or your social media presence is, is to determine why, like.
Why am I measuring this? Most of the google analytics that that we run for people is for the purpose of reporting. That’s the most requests that we get. How many hits that I get? I’r just curious. I want to know, but really the better reason to measure your web presence are for a couple of reasons. One is improvement, so there’s things you can look at within Google Analytics that might give you some indication of how you might change your web presence change.
Particular pages to make them easier for users to find, if that’s evidence that that you find in google analytics, they might be having trouble finding things or do they make them more effective to get them to spend more time on the page or two or whatever you’re. Trying to accomplish with your with your users, who are visiting your web page, one reason to use Google Analytics is to see if you’re accomplishing what you want to accomplish and if not how you can improve on that.
So that’s one reason to measure the other is impact and, in extension, we do a lot of impact measurement and are we trying to figure out? Are we connecting with people? Are we making a difference in their lives? We probably can’t get to that impact idea. Just looking at the raw data that Google Analytics provides, but that’s we’ll talk about today’s some signals of engagement and then we can, you know, potentially draw a line from engagement to maybe more significant impact with additional evaluation.
But at least it’s a start see if your see if your web presence really is, is making any difference. Another thing to think about when you’re thinking about measuring your website to is to figure out what your goal is me included for our a calm website or web services website or any of the ones that I’m involved in in contributing to our managing. I’r not very good at this either. I don’t it’s hard to determine for a Content site a specific goal, but if you can start to figure that out a little bit, it can really help you utilize the data, because without a goal to work towards the data, is just data right it’d, be like You had an extension program.
If you say we want people to achieve this behavior change, then you gather data to see if they’re achieving that behavior change. You know, then, the data makes sense, but if you don’t have that goal, if you’re like well we’re delivering this program, we don’t know what we want people to do with it. We just want to deliver it, and then you gather data around that. Then that data is essentially meaningless.
You know it doesn’t have a lot of context in terms of working towards your goal. The other thing about Google Analytics is, it is Sonya, and I were just talking about this a little bit ago earlier this afternoon. Is that it? You know is built for the majority of web site managers and end-users, and that majority exists in the for-profit world, and so in the for-profit world a lot of times. They can be much more specific about their goals right.
They want to make a sale. They want to, you know, have somebody subscribe to something they. You know they have some end goal in mind. Maybe it’s even have someone apply for a job? You know that’s the pinnacle, they start at the homepage and they go through this process and they they end up with that goal, which is some which in Google Analytics we refer to as a conversion. So what are your conversions and those are harder for us to identify because there might be multiple goals, but the closer you can get to that sort of specific idea of what you’re trying to accomplish with your web presence, then the more effective the this date is Going to be and the more you’re going to be able to put it to work for you as opposed to just going home, that’s interesting! Hey! We got visits from South Africa great.
What does that mean? Why should we care other than it’s interesting? Okay? So, let’s talk a little bit about about Google Analytics, so Google Analytics is how we are collecting data on the use of our websites. Right now, before we instituted google analytics or started using google analytics, we were using log files, so log files have existed. You know pretty much from the time that we had web browsers and basically the log files are things that can be collected by the web server about you as a visitor, and it might include you know what pages you’re clicking on.
Obviously, because when you click on a page that the web server has to deliver that page, so it collects that data. It might include what kind of browser you’re using, because that that kind of information is sent through as well and some other things, but but but limited information. So before we’re using google analytics, we were really focused on you know. How many hits did this page get or how many views this page get and those kinds of things and part of the problem with that that log file data is it’s not it’s not very deep, there’s not a huge data set there.
You have to use different third-party tools to analyze it. It’s it’s pretty much just rows in a database without are actually rose in a text file without some tool to analyze that and to compile the data in some way and the other thing that we found in it with NDSU egg communication and with the servers that We have is that it was really susceptible to what we might call phantom traffic, so this is traffic that happens when search engines, for instance, go out and index the web in order for google or any search engine to get an idea of what web pages are Out there they have to build us, what’s called a spider, to go out and find those pages and visit each one of them, and so, as those search engines do that that could accumulate views of a web page and there’s other forms of traffic as well.
That that our phantom traffic they’re, not real users, their computers that are hitting our websites and so log files and the tools associated them – do not a great job of filtering that stuff out. Google analytics does a better job of filtering that stuff out, and it also gives us a richer data set. So it wasn’t very long into the existence of eggs EMS that we decided to put the Google Analytics code that you need to put on your website or your web pages.
In order to collect this data, we decided to put that on to all the web pages in eggs EMS, so that is an important distinction for anybody who’s on. If your website is on the NDSU typo3 CMS you’re, not your data is not being collected using google analytics, it’s actually being used. I think they’re collecting data on their own and using some of those log files and internal reporting inside of their content management system.
If your website is not neg CMS, if it’s just on one of our other servers, we call them our legacy servers there’s a few websites that are still out there that aren’t on egg CMS within NDSU egg and extension. Then again, you’re relying on that kind of log file thing just the egg CMS sites have the Google Analytics code on them at least that we put on and collect data. That way. In order to see your Google Analytics there’s a couple different things you can do.
One thing is, you can request access and I think at least there might be one or two of you on the call who have requested access to Google Analytics you have to. In order for me to give you access, I have to have a non NDSU. Google account for you, so if you have a gmail account personally or if you have an Android phone, you have a google account. I can invite you using that account. I can’t use your NDSU google account for reasons unknown to me and only to IT s at the NDSU level, but I can’t invite you using your google account.
So that’s one way and there’s a few people who do that. The more common way that you see your Google Analytics is that you asked for reports, and you might do that as a once-off like it’s that time of the year again, you need to do some reporting, you send me an email or send so many an email And say: can you give me the numbers for my website and we send you some reports and some of you I see Susan and Stacy are on so for the food nutrition sites.
We have some automated reports set up, so they just get automatically get monthly report. So we can do that for you as well, if you want to to, let us know that you’d like to have that okay questions or comments so far, you want to jump in on the mic or type your questions in the chat. I see Sonja’s on tues Sonja. You know you can please correct me or fill in the blank spaces that I leave. Okay go ahead and share those in the chatter.
Interrupt me if you have any any questions whatsoever. So, in order to start to understand some of the metrics that will use to detect engagement, we can’t have to get an overview of the the main metrics in in Google Analytics and when we start with sessions. So what a session is is is that it says here, in my slide period of time, that’s kind of a bad description, but a session start when somebody hits your website.
So in the case of how we collect our Google Analytics, it begins as soon as they hit an egg CMS site on the WWE NDSU edu domain. So as soon as they hit one of our pages, their session starts and it lasts until they hit something. That is outside of our site outside of egg CMS outside of our domain, or they close their browser or they if they just viewed one page, they hit their back button and go back to a site or a page that doesn’t that isn’t on our our domain.
But that’s what a session is, so it’s the whole visit. It doesn’t matter if they go from barnes county extensions website and then click over to the food nutrition site and then click over to the plant site Department of Plant Sciences site. Those are all in our domain and they’re all in Ag CMS. So that would all be part of one session. But if they go to the Barnes County Extension site and then they go to food nutrition and then they click on something that takes them to the National Institute of Health or USDA, or something that at that point, they’re leaving our site in that session ends.
Okay, does that make sense questions about a session? Okay, so another main category or main metric is users pretty self-explanatory. Those are the people who have come to our site, haven’t had at least one session within the time period that we are seeking information for. So when you’re, looking at your, your Google Analytics, you define a date range show me analytics for the last year or the last month, or these ten days in the middle of 2014 or whatever it might be, and so that’s what you’re, when you’re looking at that Date range: it’s everybody who has had a session and we’ll get into this later, but you can sort of limit the scope of those sessions.
So when we’re looking at all users, that would be anybody. Who’s had who’s visited any page in ER, egged NDSU edu domain. As long as it exists on egg CMS, but there’s ways that you can filter that down and say only show me sessions where the users have visited a page on my site, for instance, okay, and so that’s what users are pretty easy concept. But if you have questions about that, let me let me know pageviews, so we have our users right in this in this graphic, its 87,000 plus users, and they among them have had 120,000 plus sessions for the time period that we’re looking at.
So that’s their sort of total visit experience that session, but within each session they might view multiple pages. So when you were looking at viewing on multiple pages, we refer to those as pageviews. So in those 120,000 sessions, the total number of page view pages that were viewed shouldn’t, say pages that were viewed but views of pages because some of them might be counted twice in there are 300 9250 to right.
Okay, so those are pageviews. Let me go back here, I’m going to talk about a couple other things that are pretty obvious on this slide here. So 120,000 sessions, 309 thousand page views. If you divide the number of page views by the number of sessions you get what’s in the bottom left there, the pages per session, so in an average visit, how many pages did a user view, and so in this measurement, which I don’t remember what this was Captured from it was 2.
5 six pages per session and then the other metric that you’ll see there in the bottom center is the average session duration. So how long did it take them? How much time they spend in that session and the average for this particular data set was two minutes and 27 seconds. Ok and then the last thing that you’ll see down there in the corner, there is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is pretty much unique to Google Analytics I’ve not seen it referenced in any other context other than in Google Analytics, but it’s a pretty interesting metric for web pages.
So, let’s, let’s take a look at balance right here, so it’s kind of a complicated formula and I’m not going to get into the bounce rate. But basically, what the bounce rate is is how many people came to a page and just view that one page and then left the the domain. So they only viewed one page and then they took off somewhere else. Ok, and so that is the bounce rate. So they might have left the site by you know, clicking a link to a different website, clicking the back button, closing their browser window typing in a new URL whatever, but they only looked at one page and then they were gone.
They scoot it. So here are some average bounce rates by industry. This is important because bounce rate can be interpreted a number of different ways in it and it’s one of the reasons why we say it’s important to know what you’re trying to accomplish with your website, because you can look at that number and go. Oh balance. Rate of sixty four point: five, six percent – that’s a lot – seems like a lot.
So that must not be a very good page. Well, it might be a really good page. It might be that the users are, you know, on google or another search engine, they’re searching for a particular particular solution. Why are the leaves dropping off my ash tree and they find your page and they click on it and they get their answer and then they’re, like all. I have my answer, so I’m going to go get out of here.
I’r going to close the browser. I’r going to you know, go to Facebook, whatever whatever it is, that they’re going to do so. That would produce a high bounce rate. If a lot of users are doing that, that’s a high bounce rate, but that might be okay for that page because of the purpose of the page. On the other hand, if you have a page that is a list of links to resources within your site, and so your intention is.
I want somebody to come to this page they’re, not really going to see anything here but they’re going to choose one of these links to click, and then you see that page has a high bounce rate that should concern you right assuming those links that they’re choosing From our internal links that they’re inside of your website or inside of our domain, that you can concern you, because then people are not clicking those links right if they have a high bounce rate they’re.
Looking at that page and going this isn’t for me – or this is boring, or this sucks or whatever and they’re they’re going somewhere else. So you can see our bounce rate for all egg CMS sites for basically the last year and you can compare that to some of the other, some of the other bounce rates by industry. Ok, questions about bounce rate. Alright, so I want to look at some of the metrics that you might use to detect engagement.
So some of the things like pageviews, they don’t mean a ton right. So you can look at your page views. I’r not sure what you would do with that yeah. You could put them in an impact report or or some other report that you need to prepare, but you know you could compare them to maybe last year or last month right well. Last month we had this. Many hits in this month we have this many heads, and so maybe that is some indication of growth, but it, but you have no idea, what’s happening on those pageviews right.
It could be somebody clicking that page and then immediately go on somewhere else. It could be that they’re spending ten minutes on it pouring over the information, so each of those pageviews obviously are it’s not the same. It’s going to be different for for the user and in that interaction and there’s no way to tell one from another, so they’re they’re of limited value, but some of these metrics might give us an some insight into some actual engagement.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go through and talk about each one of these and then I’ll share my screen and we’ll open up, google analytics and I’ll kind of show you what they look like in the reports and explore that a little Bit so new versus returning visitors, so how does Google tell who’s new and who’s returning? So most of these are tracked with a cookie. Cookie is a little piece of code.
That’s delivered usually to your web browser, and so it indicates to your web browser. Hey. You visited this page before and if you come back again, google analytics can check your browser and see well does that cookie exist and if you, if it does exist, then you are a returning user. The downside of using that that way of doing it is that Google is going to miss some returning users, especially those people who are visiting our sites from different devices.
So if I visit, I open google chrome and I go and visit your site and then, a day later, I open your site on my smartphone, i’m going to appear as new each time because that doesn’t carry over. So it has some some flaws. As all all this data does, or some caveats anyway, but that’s how they that’s how it’s tracked. The reason I bring this up is because visitors returning to your site might signal some engagement.
Some follow up some pattern of loyalty coming back, maybe looking for more information about something. So if you’re, looking at a given time range – let’s say the last year and you take a look at how many of how many people are new they’ve only visited your site or had one session within that time period as opposed to people who have come back. Multiple times you might be able to read some engagement into that right.
They came, they got some information, maybe they tried it. Maybe they tried a solution or and then came back to see if they can find more information about what was going on, or maybe they use that knowledge somehow and they want to build on that and see if there’s more information that they can get. So that’s where it might signal some engagement. This can also be useful for comparing new users and returning users.
As a group, you might be able to look at them and see some differences in terms of pages per visit or visit duration that might prompt some improvement in your web presence. Where you can say well, gee new new users are not really spending as much time as returning users. That might be logical, but it might also be a function of they might not know where to find things, so they may not be comfortable when they first visit.
Our site, so that’s another way that that can potentially be used. We’ll take a look at that report later questions about new versus returning who’s seen a Google Analytics report before I just want to apply in the chat cool. That was really just a question. Make sure that I was you’re still hearing me. It was getting getting kind of quiet so good. Well, so I hope I’m not covering territory that you’ve already been over, but what kind of run through some more of these engagement metrics here so another one to look at for detecting potential engagement is frequency is the frequency recency report and the name will become sort Of explanatory, because it really consists of two things: one is the count of sessions so for, given date range how often our users returning during that date range so the new versus returning will show you, oh you know, let’s say fifty one percent of our traffic in That date range were returning users, but it’s not going to show you how many times they returned right.
They could have returned once they could return 20 times in that date. Range. You don’t know, that’s where count of sessions comes in, so count of sessions will show you a breakdown of your users and based on how many sessions they had during that date range from one to twenty plus. There’s some ranges in there as well. It’s not you know, it doesn’t break it down, but 19 sessions 18 sessions. But I give you a general idea of how often are returning users coming back.
The recency part is how many days has it been since the last session, thus recency, how often our users coming back right. So, if you’re looking at a full year, are they coming back? You know sort of every seven days a week. Lee kind of thing: are they coming back monthly? Is it mostly, you know to count sessions where they were, they came once and then they came back three months later or six months later, nine months later, so you can kind of get a sense of how often people are coming back.
So you can see how either one of those numbers might be a signal of some engagement and and some site loyalty. So if you see you know for a given time period, let’s say we’re looking at six months or something like that and you see session counts. Hey there’s a thousand people that had a session count of five right. That might be something a little bit more meaningful to report or to look at then I had thirteen thousand pageviews agree or disagree.
Do you agree with that statement that count of sessions might might be a little bit more meaningful, yeah, okay, good, and then that may be. Similarly, with with days since last session, maybe a little less reportable engagement there and a little bit more just getting a sense of how users are using your site, how those returning users are coming back and are you keeping up with giving them new information? Based on that recency right, if you see people are coming back every seven days, but you’re only posting new content to your website monthly, then you might ask yourself like hey how long, how long will they keep it up? How long will they keep coming back? Every seven days, if they keep seeing the same exact thing: okay, alright, so another metric audience engagement, it says adding its engagement rate.
Google Analytics used to call it that now they just call it audience. Engagement and again here, Google Analytics uses two different metrics. The first one is session duration. So what that does is breaks down the number of of sessions of a particular length, starting with zero seconds. We can talk about that later, but 0 to 10 seconds 10 to 20 seconds on and on etc. So you can kind of see now. This is isn’t for a particular page, but for that session, how many people spent 10 seconds 20 seconds? You know two minutes, etc.
There’s a caveat with this one in terms of how it measured – and I I was telling sonia earlier today – I just found out about this today, as I was doing some additional research for this. The way that Google measures that session duration is that time sort of gets recorded within the session when a user goes from one page to another so because they have to move from one page to another. It doesn’t include.
It doesn’t include that the time spent on just one page. So if the session only had one page view in it, that time would not be considered, and the other thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t usually include the time spent on the exit page and that’s because they’re not going to another page within our Domain, so Google can’t measure that right. So so we kind of take this one along with with another one of the metrics that we’re going to have coming up with a little bit of a grain of salt.
So it can skew particular directions, but but it can be helpful. You know when you’re sort of looking at the middle there in terms of this of the session duration, the other metric, that’s involved in audience. Engagement is page depth. So that’s just the number of pages. Viewed in a session, we looked earlier at pages per session as a metric. This is a little bit different because when we’re looking at pages per session, it’s an overall average – and here we look at page depth – it’s going to show us the the number of pages.
Viewed in a session and then the number of users who fall into that that slot right. So if we say five pages viewed per session, how many users viewed five pages per session? How many users viewed or how I should say how many sessions do we have we’re only five pages reviewed? How many did we have we’re ten pages reviewed? Ok, so again, these are a couple things that might signal engagement right, so the in terms of session duration.
We might be looking at that and saying hey if we’re looking at session duration of 30 seconds. We know that it was a little bit more involved than just you know, accidentally clicking on our site and going oh there’s nothing here for me and Lynne and then leaving same thing with a page depth right people are digging in a little bit. It might indicate a little bit more engagement, so time spent on page.
This is going to be have some similar issues to session duration. When we talk about time spent on page, this is the average time that a user spends on a specific page, ok or the average of the time users spend on each page per session. Just like the session duration caveat, it does not include these one page sessions or exit pages. So I’ll talk about how you might deal with that in terms of how much you trust the time spent on page, but it can tell you or can’t give you some insight into who you know what type of pages are people spending time on, and then you Might ask yourself you know: do I need more pages like that and maybe look at pages where there’s a low time spent on on page and as long as that’s not an exit page or a page? Where you expect a one-page session to happen, then you might ask: why do I have these pages right? Are they just barriers for people to get to the the content that they want if they have a very low time spent on page, ok, all right and then the last one? I mentioned this before pages per session.
We looked at that a little bit before similar to page depth, but we’re talking about an overall average here. The question tends to be: you know: can we judge that as engagement or is it just people bouncing around seeking information, maybe never really finding it? So again we have to there’s a couple of different ways to look at that pages per session. All right, I’m going to wrap up the last two slides before I switch, so I don’t have to switch back and forth between content to my, but we’ll do a little Google Analytics demo here in just a couple of minutes.
First, I want to share a couple things with you: Sarah Bachman, who is sort of my guru in all things: evaluation; she’s, the project lead for the military families learning network based in at Virginia Tech. She identifies these keys to evaluation like you’re, going to do any kind of evaluation, including evaluating your Google Analytics your website, you know knowing what your purpose is. You know what are you trying to accomplish with your website, knowing what your goals are, and you know we talked about that in terms of conversions in Google Analytics right.
What do you want people to do? I want people to fill out this form. I want people to subscribe to this newsletter. I want people to read this article, so understanding what your goals are being consistent with the metrics of measurement over time Google Analytics sort of does that for us. But when you start gathering your data, you know make making sure that you’re comparing apples to apples right you’re, not comparing pageviews two sessions or anything like that and that you’re looking at the same kinds of reports.
If you’re going to look at things over time and see if you’re achieving your goals or not and then using the data to learn and improve which goes back to that improvement idea, this is probably the more more pressing need. When we talk about looking at our google analytics and evaluate our websites is like, instead of just reporting the numbers, you know, how can we look at the data and improve our web presence so that we can better achieve our goals and and then maybe improve the Numbers in the in the process and that all takes time and effort like any evaluation, so it does take thinking about this, setting some goals and getting into the google analytics and really kind of looking at some things.
So let me go ahead and share my screen and I will show you, google analytics here, just take a second any questions or comments before as i’m taking some time to get my my desktop up here. Alright, that’s the wrong thing! One second here here we go all right. There we go so they’re already seeing that you should be seeing a big report. How visible is that only might need to? I can zoom in if, if you need me to, I still see your PowerPoint pub, what all right wonder why that is! Oh Stacey saw it probably until I stopped presenting all right.
Let’s try this again. How about now Millie? Are you seeing that yep, okay, good? So this is how Google Analytics looks when we send you reports when sony. I send. Your reports really looks something like this usually they’re in PDF format, so they can be kind of similar, but they look look basically similar. So i’m just going to go through each of the ones that we that we talked about each of the engagement metrics and look at some of that.
Then, if you guys have questions about what else and what other metrics we can, we can go through some of those as well. So this is the new versus returning visitor report, and so, if you look down towards the bottom in the table there, oh okay, so Ken saying he lost my voice while was loading – and I don’t I didn’t say anything too terribly important can other than can you See the can you see the screen so we’re looking at the new versus returning visitor report here, so I just picked randomly kami.
I swear, I didn’t know you’re going to be on, so I just randomly picked the plant sciences website to look at here and so, as we take a look at that, here’s the the new versus returning so 75,000 sessions – and this is looking at the last year – Jun, 1, 2015, 2, jun, 1, 2015. So they’ve had 75 sessions thousand sessions. You know plus pretty even right. 51 % of them are new visitors. 48.9. Are our returning visitors, so pretty even balance there.
But as we go through that, we can see some some differences. So if we, if you go over to the right in that table – and you see in under behavior here – we’ve got the bounce rate, so in this case the bounce rate for new visitors quite a bit higher than returning visitors. So that might be something that we might want to look at. Why is that maybe digg when we can dig into the metrics a little bit more to find some of that out and and see if we can figure out why that might be pages per session? 2.
52 for new visitors 3.83 for returning visitors so again a little bit of a discrepancy there. Maybe it’s something that we want to look at and the same thing with average session duration, a minute 52 seconds, average session duration for new visitors, much higher four minutes and 17 seconds for returning visitors. So to me, there’s there’s a couple things that might be happening or that we might be able to take away from that one.
Is that comparative thing right? How can we get those numbers higher for new visitors? You know, is there something that we can do with our web design, how we’re presenting things and then the other thing is. We might be able to really see some engagement here right and we might be able to draw some conclusions about. You know what, when we get people coming back, then they engage more right. They spend more time during their sessions.
They view more pages as returning visitors than they do as new visitors. Any questions about that or insights that you might have about that new versus returning kind of thing. Okay, so here’s the oops get my tab up here. So this is the the frequency and recency report. So this is the that second metric, that we talked about and it’s broken down in those two areas right now we’re looking at the count of sessions.
So these you see here the people who, in this time period so we’re looking at a whole year. Thirty-Eight thousand of those of so about half a little more than half of the of the sessions were one-off sessions right. They came once and at least as far as Google could track. They never came back during that year. Now they might have come back on a different device, they might have a you know, deleted their cookies off their browser and come back.
Remember cuz. That cookie is the one. Is the thing that tracks that new versus returning, but in general we can kind of say well, most of the traffic was 11 session during the year and then you can kind of go down: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and then 9 through 14, etc. And then the two hundred and more ones so the 201 plus and actually 101 plus Sonia – and I have kind of looked at that and tried to dig into that.
A little bit. As that seems like a lot of sessions to us in a year. And is that internal traffic, and so we have created some what are called segments before that filter, that traffic out and that’s something that we can do. We can work with you to do if you see something that you think is an anomaly and you, like you know what I’d like to look at these numbers. Without that anomaly, we can help you do that as well.
Okay, so that’s the count of sessions and then the other thing that we talked about in frequency recency is the days since the last session and that here you can see zero day since the last. So that’s basically people who came once and then never came back. So we can kind of ignore that zero, since it doesn’t really apply to one visit or one session during that date range. But then you can look at how many days between, and so you know we see a lot here in the one day between and quite a few in the 8 to 14 day between 15 to 30 day between, and so you can might might make some inferences About that and kind of looking at how frequently your returning visitors are coming back, okay, questions about that comments, alright, so this is the engagement report and we talked about that in terms of that session duration and all of the one-page sessions so sessions on which user Only visited one page are included in this zero to ten seconds, even if they spent ten minutes on that page right.
This is this: if you want to call it a flawed sort of the blind spot of the report, we talked about how, in in order for goop for Google, to be able to measure how long someone’s been on a particular page. They have to click another page inside the site in the domain, and so if they only visit one page, they might be spending a lot of time in there they’re going to fall into 0 to 10 seconds range, because Google can’t measure them.
But for those people who visited more than one page, you know we can kind of and and that’s another thing that we could do with the filtering is we could filter out those one-page sessions and then take a closer look at this and then see all right Of the people who we could actually measure how many seconds are they spending on the site? But again kid be. It could be an indication of engagement because they are spending time on the site and then the other part of that engagement report is the page depth.
How many pages are they viewing within each session, so little it’s different than the average pages per session, because you’re actually seeing you know 41,000 of those sessions just viewed one page 10,000 views to page and so on the less than one here. Those numbers are usually caused by computer visits that Google couldn’t filter out, so it might be a web crawler like the search engines like I talked about or some other kind of automated computerized visit that doesn’t have a human being behind it, and so sometimes google doesn’t Get all of those out, but they do show up as less than one page depth, because the full page hadn’t been loaded.
So that’s page depth thing kind of get an idea of how many pages are being viewed in each session. All right, I need to move this just a little bit here and because it, my tabs, are behind this thing. Let’s get rid of that, okay, so the next metric that we’re looking at here. What metric are we looking at here? Okay, so we’re looking at time time spent on page or average time on page, and so what I’m looking at here is called the all pages report.
It looks at all the pages that were that were visited in that time range for those sessions and breaks them down that way, and this is where you could find the average time on page for that entire for all the sessions, and here it’s a minute and 24 seconds or you can drill down and see the average time on page for each page. So you see this Dakota pinnacle page average time on page is five minutes 38 seconds.
Remember this. This number came with that caveat that again, Google can’t measure time until someone clicks another page, and it also. They also can’t measure the time on exit pages, so take this average. This time, on page thing, with a with a little bit of a grain of salt, especially if you look over in the right of this column, and you see that percent exit, if that percent exit is pretty high.
All of those visits all of those page views that were exits where people left their session after viewing that page the time spent on that page didn’t count right. So if we look at this, this lecture implant sciences a lecture for a course, you can see that one here it’s line seven. It’s got three minutes and 24 seconds as time spent on page and we might think. Oh, that’s pretty good but higher than the average for this for this report, but it’s got a sixty-nine percent exit rate, so it’s probably even higher than that, because those exits those that time that those people spent did not figure into that same thing with Dakota pinnacle Looks like something that people are spending a lot of time on, because we’ve got a five minute: 38, second time on page and an eighty-six percent exit.
So so a lot of a lot of uncounted time there so kind of take that keep that in mind when you’re looking at that time spent on page all right, they got one more here that I need to get to right. We talked a little bit about pages per session and session duration, and this shows up on this audience overview report for the entire session. Our average pages per session here 3.16 in our average session duration, three minutes and three seconds again with that same caveat for time spent on page.
So those are some of the places that you might look if you’re trying to detect engagement. There’s other metrics in here that can definitely help you and or that might just be interesting. I didn’t mean to make that sound like a bad thing, sometimes interesting as interesting and and sometimes it’s even worth reporting or sharing so um. Any questions at all about Google Analytics. Are there certain things that you’d like to talk about or have me show you so Sonia saying some low bounce rates on the on the previous page? Let me take a look at that again: yeah those are pretty low.
Bounce rates so again that what that’s telling you is that these these pages are not just one and done pages, they’re part of a series of pages that are being viewed in the session when we see the one, that’s that the Dakota pinnacle page here. That’s eighty-seven percent. That’s going to indicate a lot of people came directly that page right. Either they were emailed the link or over they found it through search or whatever they viewed that one page and then boom they were.
They were out of there off the session. On to a different site, other questions things you want to know what other kinds of things are you interested in when you’re you’re like asking for reports or if you haven’t asked for a report, yet you know just what you’re curious about in your website. Nothing else. Okay, well just reiterate a couple things right: if you want reports, just let Sonia or me know, we can set up those automated reports.
If you want to get a monthly report, you can even get a weekly report or daily report if you want and those seem to have been working okay and then, if you want access to this, you want to poke around to this. You know, like I said it would just need a non NDSU. Google account for you. We could share access to to google analytics. There’s nothing in here that you can break right. You can’t, you know, take down the website or mess things up.
This is when you’re in Google Analytics and logged in, as you is sort of your dashboard, your personal view of how you want to look at things so you’re welcome to to poke around in there any time, so don’t be afraid to ask for that access. If you want it, okay cool can be happy to help all right. Well, I can stick around for well. If you guys have questions, I’m going to stop the recording now and wrap things up thanks for taking the time and third wednesday of next month.
I don’t know what date that is, and I don’t know what the topic will be for that come webinar yet to be determined, but I hope you’ll look for the email about that check out. Let’s communicate for the topic of the a calm webinar, our third wednesday of july thanks everybody
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