For many of us, traffic and website analysis is a very strange idea. But understanding traffic and reading website analytics reports doesn't have to be a complicated endeavor. First, let's break down the terminology:
Page Views: Every time someone lands on your site (when they load one of your pages), a page view is generated. Keep in mind that this is true regardless of who visits the site or how many times they have visited the site. It sounds like a bad measure of traffic and to some extent it does. We all love repeat visitors, but most of us really care about those valuable first-time people.
Visits: This metric shows how many users spent time on your website, regardless of the number of pages each user views.
Unique Visitors: This is an important stat and as the name implies, this metric only counts the unique users who visit the site. If a particular visitor comes to the site every day, it still counts as one visit.
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Pages / Visit: This metric shows how many pages a visitor viewed during each session, the higher this number the better.
Average Visit Duration: How much time do users spend on the site during each visit? While you want someone to stay on a site for a long time, the average time spent is generally three to five minutes and sometimes less. Obviously, longer is better, but the only site in the world that gets a massive visit time is currently Facebook, averaging 20 minutes per visit.
Bounce Rate: This number indicates people who "bounce" off the page. So someone comes to visit and then decides they are either in the wrong place or you've sent them into a "surf shock" and they leave. In general, the lower the number the better, but the average bounce rate is between 50 and 59 percent.
% New Visits: Visited This measure is the percentage of your traffic from new users who have never visited the site before. If you're eager to get repeat people to your site (and this often depends on the nature of your business), you want this number lower than your return traffic count.
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