The e-commerce section of Google Analytics offers the following information from its reports:
Overview: It is what it says it is, an overview of your site’s e-commerce activity. Revenue is the value of purchases. Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that resulted in a purchase. Transactions shows the number of purchases and the Average Order Value is the average revenue generated from each of these purchases. Purchased Products represents how many different products (SKUs) were sold.
Page Views and Unique Page Views sound like they are essentially the same metric, but they’re not. Although similar in name, the difference between them occurs due to the fact that they are calculated in different ways.
A page view is counted each time a page on the website being tracked is loaded or ‘viewed’. With Google Analytics a page view can be counted when any web page with the correct tracking code is loaded, or if the ‘urchinTracker’ event code executes. An ‘urchinTracker’ event can be implemented in order to simulate a page view to be included within Google Analytics reports.
Visits, Visitors and Unique Visitors all sound similar, but each metric differs significantly from the others.
Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by visitors to a website. If a user is inactive on a site for 30 minutes or more, then any future activity for that user will be counted as part of a new session and thus a new visit. Any users that leave a site, but return within 30 minutes, will be counted as part of the original session and therefore as part of the initial visit.
It is easy to misinterpret reports in analytics based on not knowing exactly what the terminology means or how the different metrics compare to one another.
Clicks and visits are metrics that are often referred to in the same sense, but they shouldn’t be as they mean different things and vary between applications.
There are a variety of methods for tracking visits to your website. Different web analytics solutions utilise distinct techniques for parsing data and it is therefore quite usual to see discrepancies between their reports. When considering how metrics compare across different web analytics packages you shouldn’t be comparing the numbers. Instead by looking at data trends you will generally tend to see similarities in the statistics.
The main reasons why there are differences between the actual reported numbers within Google Analytics and other web analytics products are listed below:
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Why Does Google Analytics Report Differing Figures To Some Other Web Analytics Products?
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Once you have analytics you should ask yourself, what do I want my website to do better?
Analytics software produces metrics. Metrics are measurements. There are many sorts of feasible website metrics – for instance, the number of times web pages are viewed, how many unique visitors came to the site, the total quantity of visits from a particular geographic location, and so on. Analytics can also calculate how long the average person spends on your website, the number of people who leave or ‘bounce’ from your site after arriving at a particular page, it can distinguish how people find your website, etc, etc, …