Web Analytics for Businessmen in 15 Minutes
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 8:12 am
In this article, briefly, about the basic concepts and principles of Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics. And also about the differences between these two systems. I showed on simple examples how to quickly find out the basic data about the site's operation.
What this article does not contain are recommendations for setting up analytics or technical issues of its operation. First of all, I wanted to give people who are far from web analytics the minimum necessary basis for understanding the main terms. After reading the article, you will be able to clearly check the contractor's analytical reports and independently, quickly, check the main parameters of the site's operation.
Basic concepts
Let's start with the main analytics parameters. In Yandex Metrica or Google Analytics reports, you will regularly encounter such concepts as "visits", "visitors", "views", "bounces", "view depth", "goal achievements", "conversions". Let's figure out what all this means.
But let's start with the concept of traffic.
Traffic is the flow of visitors to your site.
It is a flow, like a river flow. When they say that "there is list of taiyuan cell phone numbers a lot of traffic" or about "traffic growth" - it means that a lot of visitors come to the site, or their number has increased significantly. If they say that there is low-quality traffic, it means that visitors do not perform the necessary target actions, or the percentage of erroneous transitions to the site (the bounce rate) is greatly overstated.
A view (pageviews, hit) is the opening or refreshing (F5) of any one page of a site.
A person landed on your site — 1 view. Spins the mouse wheel and scrolls the page up and down — still 1 view. Pressed F5 on the keyboard or "Refresh" in the browser — that will be 2 views. Clicked on the menu and landed on another page of your site — that's 3 views. Clicked on an external link and went to another site — still 3 views.
In addition to views, a visitor can perform certain events (hits) on the site - click the "Add to cart" button, download a price list, send an order or registration form.
In order for the analytics system to know about the event, the website element (button, link, form) must send a message to the counter about the occurrence of such an event using JavaScript code. That is, for each event, the necessary "triggers" must be written in the website code, which will work when the visitor performs the required action.
A visit (session) begins with a visit to your site and includes all views and events on your site during a certain time interval. This is the main accounting unit to which the analytics system links most of the operational data about what is happening on the site: where the visitor came to the site from, what pages they looked at, what they clicked on - all this is linked to a visit.
As long as a visitor interacts with your site content, all views and events are recorded as one visit. A visit ends when the visitor has not sent any new events for 30 minutes. You can change the inactivity time before the session ends. This may be necessary if the site contains long articles or videos that take more than 30 minutes to view. With a standard timeout of 30 minutes, if a visitor closes the site but returns to it after 20 minutes, all new views and actions will be added to the previous visit. The exception is clicks from ads. With each new click from ads, regardless of how much time has passed since the visitor's last activity on the site, a new visit will be recorded.
In each browser, when visiting a site, an individual identifier is saved in the form of a cookie file. This file is used by analytics systems to recognize the visitor and distinguish one visitor from another.
A visitor is not a specific person, but a browser. In Google Analytics, a visitor is called a User.
If the same person visited the site from one computer, but used different browsers, the analytics systems will count it as two different visitors. The same picture will be if a person visited the site from different devices, for example, first from a computer, and then from a tablet. Therefore, it is important to understand that the number of visitors in analytics reports is always greater than the number of real people who visited the site.
Important traffic metrics
How Yandex and Google Count Bounce Rates
Before we go any further, it is necessary to talk about the differences in the interpretation of visitor actions in Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics.
Almost all Metrica and Analytics reports have an important indicator - the bounce rate in Analytics or simply bounces in Metrica. This is one of the main criteria for assessing the quality of traffic coming to the site. Although they are called almost the same, these indicators are calculated completely differently:
Yandex.Metrica considers a visit that lasted less than 15 seconds and during this time only one view to be a bounce. A person went to the site, realized that this was not what he was looking for, and left the site.
Analytics considers a bounce to be a visit to just one page, without performing any other actions. The time spent on the page does not matter. Do you feel the difference? If you have a one-page site, Analytics will consider the lion's share of visitors to be bounces.
You can't change this feature of Analytics. But you can create an event using JavaScript that will poll the visitor's browser after 15 seconds and send the event to Analytics. In this case, the bounce rate will work more correctly.
What is View Depth
The second important traffic quality indicator is pageview depth . It shows the number of pageviews in one visit. In summary reports, pageview depth will show the ratio of the number of visits to the number of views.
If your site consists of only one page, it would be logical that the pageview depth would always be 1. But in practice, you will most likely see values of 1.1 - 1.3. Don't be surprised - this means that one of the visitors pressed refresh (F5) on the page.
By the way, with a single-page site, the value of the viewing depth, tending to 2, can indirectly indicate some problems on the site. For some reason, visitors often refresh the page of your site. On multi-page sites, this indicator, together with the time spent, can be used to judge the interest of visitors in the content of your site, i.e., the quality of traffic.
What this article does not contain are recommendations for setting up analytics or technical issues of its operation. First of all, I wanted to give people who are far from web analytics the minimum necessary basis for understanding the main terms. After reading the article, you will be able to clearly check the contractor's analytical reports and independently, quickly, check the main parameters of the site's operation.
Basic concepts
Let's start with the main analytics parameters. In Yandex Metrica or Google Analytics reports, you will regularly encounter such concepts as "visits", "visitors", "views", "bounces", "view depth", "goal achievements", "conversions". Let's figure out what all this means.
But let's start with the concept of traffic.
Traffic is the flow of visitors to your site.
It is a flow, like a river flow. When they say that "there is list of taiyuan cell phone numbers a lot of traffic" or about "traffic growth" - it means that a lot of visitors come to the site, or their number has increased significantly. If they say that there is low-quality traffic, it means that visitors do not perform the necessary target actions, or the percentage of erroneous transitions to the site (the bounce rate) is greatly overstated.
A view (pageviews, hit) is the opening or refreshing (F5) of any one page of a site.
A person landed on your site — 1 view. Spins the mouse wheel and scrolls the page up and down — still 1 view. Pressed F5 on the keyboard or "Refresh" in the browser — that will be 2 views. Clicked on the menu and landed on another page of your site — that's 3 views. Clicked on an external link and went to another site — still 3 views.
In addition to views, a visitor can perform certain events (hits) on the site - click the "Add to cart" button, download a price list, send an order or registration form.
In order for the analytics system to know about the event, the website element (button, link, form) must send a message to the counter about the occurrence of such an event using JavaScript code. That is, for each event, the necessary "triggers" must be written in the website code, which will work when the visitor performs the required action.
A visit (session) begins with a visit to your site and includes all views and events on your site during a certain time interval. This is the main accounting unit to which the analytics system links most of the operational data about what is happening on the site: where the visitor came to the site from, what pages they looked at, what they clicked on - all this is linked to a visit.
As long as a visitor interacts with your site content, all views and events are recorded as one visit. A visit ends when the visitor has not sent any new events for 30 minutes. You can change the inactivity time before the session ends. This may be necessary if the site contains long articles or videos that take more than 30 minutes to view. With a standard timeout of 30 minutes, if a visitor closes the site but returns to it after 20 minutes, all new views and actions will be added to the previous visit. The exception is clicks from ads. With each new click from ads, regardless of how much time has passed since the visitor's last activity on the site, a new visit will be recorded.
In each browser, when visiting a site, an individual identifier is saved in the form of a cookie file. This file is used by analytics systems to recognize the visitor and distinguish one visitor from another.
A visitor is not a specific person, but a browser. In Google Analytics, a visitor is called a User.
If the same person visited the site from one computer, but used different browsers, the analytics systems will count it as two different visitors. The same picture will be if a person visited the site from different devices, for example, first from a computer, and then from a tablet. Therefore, it is important to understand that the number of visitors in analytics reports is always greater than the number of real people who visited the site.
Important traffic metrics
How Yandex and Google Count Bounce Rates
Before we go any further, it is necessary to talk about the differences in the interpretation of visitor actions in Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics.
Almost all Metrica and Analytics reports have an important indicator - the bounce rate in Analytics or simply bounces in Metrica. This is one of the main criteria for assessing the quality of traffic coming to the site. Although they are called almost the same, these indicators are calculated completely differently:
Yandex.Metrica considers a visit that lasted less than 15 seconds and during this time only one view to be a bounce. A person went to the site, realized that this was not what he was looking for, and left the site.
Analytics considers a bounce to be a visit to just one page, without performing any other actions. The time spent on the page does not matter. Do you feel the difference? If you have a one-page site, Analytics will consider the lion's share of visitors to be bounces.
You can't change this feature of Analytics. But you can create an event using JavaScript that will poll the visitor's browser after 15 seconds and send the event to Analytics. In this case, the bounce rate will work more correctly.
What is View Depth
The second important traffic quality indicator is pageview depth . It shows the number of pageviews in one visit. In summary reports, pageview depth will show the ratio of the number of visits to the number of views.
If your site consists of only one page, it would be logical that the pageview depth would always be 1. But in practice, you will most likely see values of 1.1 - 1.3. Don't be surprised - this means that one of the visitors pressed refresh (F5) on the page.
By the way, with a single-page site, the value of the viewing depth, tending to 2, can indirectly indicate some problems on the site. For some reason, visitors often refresh the page of your site. On multi-page sites, this indicator, together with the time spent, can be used to judge the interest of visitors in the content of your site, i.e., the quality of traffic.