How to: make sense of your analytics dashboard

Terms are shown in order of appearance on the GeniusAnalytics dashboard.

Total Visits (Total Sessions)

Bounce Rate

Pages Per Visit (Pages Per Session)

Average Visit Time (Average Session Duration)

Unique Visitors (Users)

Visits From Organic

Top Sources

Visits From Mobile

Returning Visits Rate

New vs. Returning

Number of Organic Landing Pages

Total Visits (Trend)

Top Landing Pages

Top Referrers

Top Pages (Pageviews)

Social Networks

Top Exit Pages (Visits)

Top Cities (Visits)

Conversion Rate

Conversions (Goal)

Average Visit Value

Total Goal Value

Top Converting Goals

Top Conversion Paths

Total Visits (Total Sessions)

Definition: The amount of times people visited your website in a given time period. 

Influence Factors: There are many factors that can influence how many visits your site receives in any given month. These factors can including online variables like new links to your website, increases or decreases in search rankings, viral social posts, and many more. However, they can also include external factors, such as power outages, a client moving out of your service area, and the loss of a pet. 

When to Analyze : Total visits should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: There are many things you can do to increase website visits, including posting to social media with links back to your website, posting keyword-rich blogs on a regular basis, running pay-per-click campaigns, and generally following the recommendations given by your CSM, as increasing website visitors is one of the main success metrics we focus on at Genius Platforms.

Bounce Rate

Definition: Bounce rate is the percentage of website visits that resulted in just one pageview. For example, if two people visit your site, with one person only visiting your homepage then closing the browser, and the other visiting your homepage, then clicking through to your contact page, your bounce rate would be 50%.

Influence Factors: Bounce rate changes significantly per page and content type. For example, you home page is likely to have a lower bounce rate than, say, a blog page, as blog pages tend to be articles that people find by searching a specific keyword, clicking through to a blog article, reading it, then leaving the site after they consume the content they were looking for. This specific instance would be considered a bounce because the user only visited one page before leaving.

When to Analyze: Bounce rate is good to look at on an overall site level on a monthly basis to ensure there are no large (>10%) increases during this time. However, bounce rate is more effective when you look at it on a page by page basis. If you see one page of your site has a significantly larger bounce rate than the average, there are steps that you can take to ensure people are clicking through to a new page and spending more time on your site.

How to Improve: Find pages that have high bounce rate by logging into google analytics and going to Behavior>Site Content>Landing Pages and filtering the “Bounce Rate” column to show the highest bounce rates on top. Once you have located the pages that have the highest bounce rates and the highest traffic, start adding call-to-actions or block of content at the end of the articles/pages to encourage users to click through to additional pages on your site.

Pages Per Visit (Pages Per Session)

Definition: The average number of pages users view on your site per visit.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that influence how many pages people visit on your site, the main one being the amount of engaging content your site has. When users are prompted to visit additional pages on your site via calls-to-action, buttons, and “related content” blocks, your pages per visit increases.

When to Analyze: Pages per visit is best to look at on an overall site level on a quarterly or year-over-year basis to gauge if there have been any significant increases or decreases. A significant change would be considered anything over a 2 page average change. 

How to Improve: Continuously add engaging content with call-to-action buttons and “related content” throughout the content to encourage users to click through to read additional pages.

Average Visit Time (Average Session Duration)

Definition: The average time users spend on your site per visit.

Influence Factors: Average visit time is a metric that can be influenced by many factors, including the amount of content, length of content, and over content engagement of your website.

When to Analyze: Average visit time is best to look at on an overall site level on a quarterly or year-over-year basis to gauge if there have been any significant increases or decreases. A significant change would be considered anything over a 30 second average change.

How to Improve: Continuously make sure you are publishing engaging content. Types of content that can increase average visit time include long form content and videos on service and blog pages.

Unique Visitors (Users)

Definition: An individual person browsing your website. Each user can visit your website multiple times, for example, 1 user could create 3 sessions (visits) on your website.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that can influence how many users come to your site in any given month. These factors can including online variables like new links to your website, increases or decreases in search rankings, viral social posts, and many more. However, they can also include external factors, such as power outages, a client moving out of your service area, and the loss of a pet. 

When to Analyze:  Unique Visitors should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve:There are many things you can do to increase website users, including posting to social media with links back to your website, posting keyword-rich blogs on a regular basis, running pay-per-click campaigns, and generally following the recommendations given by your CSM, as increasing website visitors is one of the main success metrics we focus on at Genius Platforms.

Visits From Organic

Definition: This is the amount of visits from Organic Traffic, which refers to people clicking on a free link from a search results page. For example, people clicking through to your website from a free result on a Google search results page.

Influence Factors: For the purpose of this article we will be referring to Google, which has over 200 ranking factors! Here is the most recent list of known and speculative ranking factors: https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

When to Analyze: Organic Traffic should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: With over 200 rankings factors, there are many ways you can improve your Organic Traffic. However, we have seen that the most critical and beneficial things you can do to increase your Organic Traffic performance includes publishing fresh content (including blogs and service page videos) and staying relevant on social media. 

Top Sources

Definition: This shows where your traffic is coming from. The main sources include Organic (free traffic from search engines like Google), Referral (link from other websites), Direct (someone who types in your URL directly or through a bookmark, Social (referral from a social site like Facebook).

Influence Factors: Each source is its own entity driving its own type of traffic, therefore each source should be looked at individually to determine its influence factors. For example, to increase traffic from social you could look at posting times and frequency. For a list of specific influence factors for a specific source type, please contact your CSM.

When to Analyze: Top Sources should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: Because each source has its own influence factors, improvement should be thought about on an individual level. For example, posting blogs to increase organic traffic, or sharing on social to increase social traffic. For a list of specific tasks you can take to increase traffic from a specific source, please contact your CSM.

Visits From Mobile

Definition: The total number of visits that were conducted via a mobile device (mobile phones and tablets).

Influence Factors: Factors that could affect how many visits your websites gets from people on mobile devices includes anything having to do with the mobile-optimization of your site, or how friendly your site is for mobile users. Google has recently switched to a mobile-first indexing pattern, giving more emphasis on mobile friendly websites. Luckily for you, all Genius Platforms websites are highly optimized for mobile devices.

When to Analyze: Visits From Mobile should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year and when large updates are made to Google’s algorithm regarding how it prioritizes mobile websites.This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: Luckily for you, the Genius Platforms web development team has put a large emphasis on ensuring all of our client’s sites are fully optimized for mobile devices. If you have any questions about the mobile-friendliness of your website, please reach out to your CSM.

Returning Visits Rate

Definition: The percentage (or rate) of users who had previously been to your site in the past, before visiting again. Because we always want to be sending new visitors to your site, returning visits rate should hover somewhere around 30%.

Influence Factors: There is a wide range of factors that can affect when a user comes back to your site, including the frequency of appointment scheduling, the effectiveness of your marketing, and many more.

When to Analyze: Returning Visits Rate should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: There are many ways you can get repeat users back to your site, including sending out marketing emails to your client list and running Google Ads Remarketing campaigns. For additional ideas on how you can bring repeat users back to your site, please reach out to your CSM.

New vs. Returning 

Definition: This pie chart shows you the total amount, as well as the percentages, of users who had been to your site before (returning) vs the users who had never been to your site before (new).

Influence Factors:  There is a wide range of factors that can affect what type of users (new vs. returning) are coming to your site, including the awareness of your brand, the types of marketing campaigns your practice is running, and many more.

When to Analyze: The New vs. Returning metric should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: Because we always want to be sending new visitors to your site, returning visits rate should hover somewhere around 30%. If it is less than that, you should contact your CSM about steps we can take to increase repeat visitors, like starting remarketing campaigns. If it is greater than that, you should contact your CSM about steps we can take to increase new visitors, including created service page videos to boost on-page SEO.

Number of Organic Landing Pages

Definition: A landing page is a page that a user entered your site on. Taking it a step further, an organic landing page is a page where someone entered your site by clicking on an organic listing on a search engine like Google. The more pages/keywords your site is ranking for in the search results the better chance you have of being found, which is why we track how many pages people entered your site on from the search results. Think of it this way: Do you ONLY want people to find you by searching for your brand name, or do you want people to be able to find you by searching for many different industry keywords?

Influence Factors: The total number of organic landing pages is influenced by the effectiveness of your on-page and off-site SEO and how well each of your pages is ranking in the search results. These factors include on-site factors such as keyword density in your body content, keyword usage in the page titles, how often you are publishing new content, etc. and off-site factors such as how many other pages are linking to your page. 

When to Analyze: The Number of Organic Landing Pages metric should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month, as well as year-over-year. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample size. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: There are many actions you can take to improve how many of your pages are driving entrances into your site from the search results, including always publishing new content, as well as updating your current content to ensure it is following SEO best-practices. For a more specific list of steps your business can take to increase this metric, please reach out to your CSM.

Total Visits (Trend)

Definition: This bar chart shows you the total number of visits on a monthly basis over the past year.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that can influence how many visits your site receives in any given month. These factors can including online variables like new links to your website, increases or decreases in search rankings, viral social posts, and many more. However, they can also include external factors, such as power outages, a client moving out of your service area, and the loss of a pet. 

When to Analyze: The total visits trend should be looked at on a monthly basis and compared month-over-month. This is to ensure that business decisions are being made using data with a large enough sample sizes. Making rash decisions based on small data sets could potentially harm your business in significant ways.

How to Improve: There are many things you can do to increase website visits, including posting to social media with links back to your website, posting keyword-rich blogs on a regular basis, running pay-per-click campaigns, and generally following the recommendations given by your CSM, as increasing website visitors is one of the main success metrics we focus on at Genius Platforms.

Top Landing Pages

Definition: A landing page is a page that a user entered your site on. We look at this to get an idea of what keywords/topics users are searching for to find your business. For example, if a user enters your site on the Dog Vaccination service page, it is more than likely they were searching for “dog vaccination” type keywords and your service page showed up in the search results. On the other hand, if they entered your site on the homepage, it is more likely that they found you by searching for a more general term like “Animal hospital near me”.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that influence what pages of your site people are entering the most. Some of these factors include the search term they typed into Google, what pages you are linking to on marketing campaigns, and how well each of your pages are ranking for specific keywords.

When to Analyze: Top Landing Pages should be looked at on a monthly basis to get a general idea of what topics and pages are driving the most traffic to your website.

How to Improve: If you see that a page is not driving as much traffic as you expect it to, please reach out to your CSM for a specific list of actions we can take for your practice to increase entrances into these pages. Some examples could include boosting on-page SEO with video or creating a PPC campaign focused around the specific topic.

Top Referrers

Definition: This is a list of the websites that sent the most traffic to your site via a link to your site that was located on their site. For example, say a post on Facebook with a link to your website went viral and 232 people clicked on the link, this would result in 232 visits (or referrals) from Facebook.

Influence Factors: The main factors to consider when analyzing referrals is where and how many times a link to your website appears on other websites around the web.

When to Analyze: You should look at Top Referrers on a monthly basis to ensure you are not receiving any Google Analytics referral spam. If websites are showing up in this widget that you are not familiar with or that have unusual looking URLs, please reach out to your CSM to let them know so they can filter out the unwanted bot traffic.

How to Improve: To increase to amount of referral traffic you are getting it is best to start a link-building campaign. To begin an outreach campaign, build a list of local publications, organizations and businesses that you can reach out to and ask for links back to your website.

Top Pages (Pageviews)

Definition: This is a list of the most popular pages on your site ranked by the number of times they were viewed.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that can affect which pages on your website are visited the most, including site navigation, popular topics, and which pages are ranking well in the search engines and driving traffic.

When to Analyze: Top Pages by Pageviews should be looked at on a monthly basis to see which topics on your website people are most interested in.

How to Improve: If there is a page that you would like people to visit more that you do not see listed as a top page for pageviews, there are a number of actions you can take to increase visibility of a page. Examples of steps you can take to increase pageviews on a specific page include adding a link to the page in the main navigation or homepage banner, increasing on-page SEO by adding video, and starting a PPC campaign pointing directly to that page.

Social Networks

Definition: This view shows you the top social networks that sent visits to your site over the last month.

Influence Factors: The amount of visits you are getting from specific social networks includes factors such as: how often you are posting on the site, how often you are linking back to your site in the posts, the size of your following on a given network, and many more.

When to Analyze: Social Network traffic should be looked at on a monthly basis to see how effective your team has been in terms of driving traffic from the different social networks.

How to Improve: If you see that you are driving less-than-average results from a specific social network, there are many action items you can focus on to increase results, including increasing post frequency and analyzing content engagement. 

Top Exit Pages (Visits)

Definition: This is a list of the last pages people viewed on your site before they exited. A user can exit a site by closing the browser or leaving your website for another.

Influence Factors: There are many reasons, both good and bad, why people may decide to leave your site. An example of a good reason could be they found the request appointment form, filled it out, and are ready to leave. An example of a bad reason could be they couldn’t find what they were looking for in a reasonable amount of time, got frustrated, and left.

When to Analyze: Top Exit Pages should be looked at on a monthly basis to see which pages people are abandoning your site on. Pages that we want to see here include include pages that contain high priority conversion actions on them, such as form pages, contact pages and location pages.

How to Improve: If you are seeing that a lot of the top exit pages match the top entrance pages, this is an indication that users are visiting just one page before they leave your site. If this is the case, there are specific actions we can take to ensure we are driving users towards conversion actions before they leave your site, as well as bringing users back to your site once they are ready to convert through programs like remarketing.

Top Cities (Visits)

Definition: This is a list showing what city your website visitors were located in when they visited your site, ranked from highest to lowest.

Influence Factors: There is not a whole lot you can do to affect where your organic traffic is coming from, in fact, some clients get alarmed when they begin seeing visits from cities far out of their service area. However, this is actually a sign of successful SEO, and indicates that your website has good content that is ranking well and being found by users all over the country and the world. On the other hand, in terms of PPC campaigns, we have the ability to set where our ads are seen geographically.

When to Analyze: Top Cities should be quickly looked at on a monthly basis to see if any new or unusual cities are listed, or is there has been a big shift in what cities your traffic is coming from.

How to Improve: If your website is all of a sudden receiving traffic from a city that is not in your service area, and the shift coincides with recent changes made to your marketing program, it would be a good idea to contact your CSM asking for an investigation of the data.

Conversion Rate

Definition: Conversion rate tells you how well your website is optimized in terms of sending users towards the desired conversion actions listed in the Top Converting Goals widget of your GeniusAnalytics dashboard. Conversion rate is calculated as follows:

               Total number of conversions triggered 

Total Visits                            X    100  = Conversion Rate

Influence Factors: There are many factors that influence how many times your conversion actions were triggered in any given month, including how easily each conversion action is triggered and the quality of the traffic that is being sent to your website. For a list of more influence factors for a specific conversion goal being tracked, please reach out to your CSM.

When to Analyze: Conversion Rate should be looked at on a monthly basis and should be compared month-over-month and year-over-year to ensure we are making good progress in our optimization efforts to increase total conversions triggered.

How to Improve: There are many ways conversion rate can be improved, most of which include optimizing your site to make conversion paths easy to follow. For example, if you see that many people are visiting your Request Appointment page, but not many people are visiting the Request Appointment Form Thank You page, we can look at the form to see if there is a step users might be getting hung up on, resulting in a high abandonment rate. By identifying, and fixing, the problem with the form, we can assume more people will fill it out, in effect increasing conversion rate.

Conversions (Goal)

Definition: This is the total number of Google Analytics goals that were triggered. You can see a breakdown of the goals we are tracking in Google Analytics and the number of times they were triggered in the Top Converting Goals widget in your GeniusAnalytics dashboard.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that influence how many times your conversion actions were triggered in any given month, including how many visitors your site received, what pages users are visiting, and the needs of the visitors.

When to Analyze: Conversions should be looked at on a monthly basis and should be compared month-over-month and year-over-year to ensure we are making good progress in our optimization efforts to increase total conversions triggered.

How to Improve: Each conversion goal has its own specific action items you can take to increase the conversion rate of that specific goal. For example, if you see that many people are visiting your Request Appointment page, but not many people are visiting the Request Appointment Form Thank You page, we can look at the form to see if there is a step users might be getting hung up on, resulting in a high abandonment rate.

Average Visit Value

Definition: The average visit value takes the total value of all conversions triggered and divides it by the total number of visits in the same time frame to show you the value of each visit. We use this number to calculate the return on investment of our advertising efforts. Theoretically, if we can get a user to the site for less than the average visit value, we will be making a profit.

Influence Factors: Average visit value is affected by how many times your goals were triggered in any given month. The more times your high value goals (like first time callers) are triggered, the higher your total goal value will be, which will help to increase the average visit value.

When to Analyze: Average visit value should be looked at and analyzed on a monthly and yearly basis and should be compared month-over-month and year-over-year to assess what changes have been made that are affecting your bottom line and how much you should theoretically be spending on marketing to attract visitors to your website. For example, if your yearly average visit value is $1.50, but you are spending $2.25 average cost-per-click on your PPC campaigns, you would be losing money and should look for ways to decrease your average cost-per-click below your average visit value.

How to Improve: The best way to increase average visit value is to increase the amount of times that high value conversion goals are triggered on your site. Each conversion goal has its own specific action items you can take to increase the conversion rate of that specific goal. For example, if you see that many people are visiting your Request Appointment page, but not many people are visiting the Request Appointment Form Thank You page, we can look at the form to see if there is a step users might be getting hung up on, resulting in a high abandonment rate.

Total Goal Value

Definition: This is the total sum of the monetary values of the Google Analytics goals set up within your account. For example, if we have set up a goal to trigger each time a new customer calls your business, and we set the value of that goal at $100 per occurrence, the total goal value if we receive 5 calls would be $500. For a list of all the goals and their conversion values, contact your CSM.

Influence Factors: Total goal value is influenced by the specific monetary values of each conversion goal and how many times each goal was triggered in a given month.

When to Analyze: Total Goal Value should be looked at on a monthly basis and should be used to analyze total return on investment of your marketing services. To calculate your ROI, use the following formula:

ROI = (Total Goal Value - Marketing Costs) / Marketing Costs

How to Improve: The best way to increase Total Goal Value is to increase the amount of times conversion goals are triggered on your site. Each conversion goal has its own specific action items you can take to increase the conversion rate of that specific goal. For example, if you see that many people are visiting your Request Appointment page, but not many people are visiting the Request Appointment Form Thank You page, we can look at the form to see if there is a step users might be getting hung up on, resulting in a high abandonment rate. If you notice a specific goal that seems to be declining, please reach out to your CSM.

Top Converting Goals

Definition: This is a list showing all the goals we are tracking in Google Analytics and how many times they were triggered.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that influence how many times your conversion actions were triggered in any given month, including how many visitors your site received, what pages users are visiting, and the needs of the visitors.

When to Analyze: Top Converting Goals should be looked at on a month basis to see what actions users are taking on your site. If you notice that a specific goal that is usually triggered many times has a noticeable decrease in any given month, please reach out to your CSM to request additional analysis.

How to Improve: Each conversion goal has its own specific action items you can take to increase the conversion rate of that specific goal. For example, if you see that many people are visiting your Request Appointment page, but not many people are visiting the Request Appointment Form Thank You page, we can look at the form to see if there is a step users might be getting hung up on, resulting in a high abandonment rate. If you notice a specific goal that seems to be declining, please reach out to your CSM.

Top Conversion Paths

Definition: The Top Conversion Paths widget shows you how users are accessing and finding your site before they trigger one or more of the conversion actions listed in the Top Converting Goals widget. For example, if the top conversion path is listed as “Organic>Direct” that mean the user(s) found your site organically, left the site without triggering a conversion, then came back to your site directly, at which point they triggered one or more of the goals we have set up.

Influence Factors: There are many factors that influence how many times and via which channels website users are finding your site before they trigger a conversion action. These factors can range from not having the cash to schedule an appointment until payday to just wanting to read about a topic before they make a decision.

When to Analyze: Top Conversion Paths should be looked at on a monthly basis to monitor how many times and via what channel users are accessing your site before they convert.

How to Improve: More often than not, users visit your site two times before they trigger a conversion action. If you are seeing that it is taking a majority of users significantly more visits to your site before they trigger a conversion action, please reach out to your CSM for additional actions your practice can take specifically to increase the conversion rate of first and second time visitors.