How website analytics work
Web analytics helps you track, analyze, and record more valuable website metrics about your visitor's actions and behavior on your site. This report shows you numbers and graphs that provides a overall picture of the key performance metrics on your website like the total number of visitors who visit your site, how they land (channels and traffic sources) on your site, how many sessions they had on your site, which pages they enter and exit your site, how long they spent on your site, and more.
Web analytics starts automatically collecting data from all visitors and all pages on your website as soon as you install the code snippet in it.
It doesn't require you to configure experiments on your web pages to collect visitor information.
Web analytics track data based on Sessions. Here, a Session refers to the set of actions or interactions made by a user (both new and returning visitor) on your website in a given time period. By default, a Session will expire after 30 minutes of visitor inactivity.
For example, say a 'Visitor A' enters your website and performs a few clicks or interactions on a page. In web analytics, this interaction will be counted as a '1 session'. Now, if the same visitor re-enters your site after 30 minutes of inactivity, then the previous session will expire, and the session data will be increased to '2'. In this case, the returning visitor will be identified as 'Visitor B.'
For example, say a 'Visitor A' enters your website and performs a few clicks or interactions on a page. In web analytics, this interaction will be counted as a '1 session'. Now, if the same visitor re-enters your site after 30 minutes of inactivity, then the previous session will expire, and the session data will be increased to '2'. In this case, the returning visitor will be identified as 'Visitor B.'
Web analytics tracks quantitative data on your website, such as visitors, sessions, traffic sources, page views, bounce rate, and average session duration. This helps identify where your website traffic comes from and what it does on your site.
Data calculation with an example
Let's understand how data is calculated in web analytics with respect to sessions by considering the Unique Pageviews metric.
Unique Pageviews is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. For instance, if 'Visitor A' visits or views the 'abc.com' in 4 different sessions, then the unique pageview will be counted as '4' in web analytics.
Here, if the visitor lands on your web page multiple times within 30 minutes duration (i.e. a single session), then the visitor will be considered as a unique visitor. Post 30 minutes, if the same visitor lands on the same web page, it will be counted as a new session and the visitor will be considered as a returning visitor.
We hope this documentation helps make the process easy for you. Please feel free to reach out to us anytime by dropping an email to support@zohomarketingautomation.com if you need more explanation or have any questions.