Analytics reports are built for people who look at them every day, which is a problem if you look at yours twice a year. There are hundreds of figures and almost all of them are noise. These are the few worth knowing.
Landing pages
The pages people arrive on — the first thing they see, rather than the pages they eventually wander to. This is the most useful list on the whole report, because improving a page that a lot of people land on has more effect than improving anything else.
The top entry is usually just a slash, which is your home page. If you have several hundred arrivals on one particular page, go and look at that page as if you had never seen it. What does it ask the visitor to do? Is that obvious within a second of the page loading?
Sessions, users and views
Three numbers that sound like the same number and are not. A user is one person. A session is one visit by that person, so somebody who comes back three times in a week is one user and three sessions. A view is one page being looked at, so a single session might be a dozen views.
When somebody quotes you a traffic figure and it sounds impressively large, it is worth asking which of the three they mean.
Referrers, or traffic sources
Where people were immediately before they arrived on your site. A directory, a supplier who lists you, a forum somebody mentioned you on, a social post. These are the places sending you business without you asking.
Two questions to ask of that list. Can you get more out of the ones already working? And which obvious ones are missing entirely — trade bodies, local directories, suppliers who ought to link to their stockists?
Keywords, and why half of them say nothing
The searches that brought people to you. You will see entries like "not provided" or "not set", sometimes making up most of the list, and people often assume something is broken.
Nothing is broken. Google deliberately withholds most search terms from analytics for privacy reasons, and has done for years. The place to look instead is Google Search Console, which is free, connects to your site in a few minutes, and does show you the actual searches you appear for — along with where you ranked and how often anybody clicked.
Bounce rate, and why to mostly ignore it
The proportion of people who arrived and left without doing anything else. It gets quoted as a quality score and it is not one. Somebody who lands on your contact page, reads your phone number and rings you is a bounce. So is somebody who reads an article to the end and leaves satisfied.
A high bounce rate on a page whose job is to be read is fine. A high bounce rate on a product page is worth investigating. Context is the whole thing.
The one number that actually matters
Enquiries. Forms sent, calls made, baskets completed. Everything above is only useful insofar as it explains a change in that. Traffic that does not turn into work is a vanity figure, and a modest amount of the right traffic beats a great deal of the wrong sort every time.
If you are not sure what your numbers are telling you, send us the site address and we will have a look and tell you in plain English.