The PPM Team put together the On-Demand Analytics Dashboards for College Admins to review their PPM website metrics and insights. Here is a list of terms and definitions to help navigate and understand the dashboard:
Active Users: Active users is the primary metric used in Google Analytics to show you how many people have visited your website or used your app. To be considered active, a user needs to have an engaged session or be reported as a new user. See also engaged sessions and new user.
Average Engagement Time: Average engagement time tells you the average amount of time people spend on your website or app. This metric is calculated by dividing the total time by the total number of users. To calculate time, a user needs to spend at least one second on a page, and Google Analytics only counts the amount of time when the browser is visible (time is not counted when the browser or tab is hidden or minimized). See also user engagement and average engagement time per session.
Average Engagement Time per Session: This metric is similar to average engagement time but based on sessions instead of users. This metric is calculated by dividing the total time by the total number of sessions. See also average engagement time.
Bounce: A metric available in the previous version of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) that reported the number of sessions with a single page view. Replaced by engaged sessions and bounce rate in GA4.
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that last less than ten seconds, do not include a conversion, and/or only include one page view. In GA4 bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that are not ‘engaged’. See also engaged sessions.
Channel: Channels provide top-level groupings of your inbound marketing. Each channel combines source and medium so you can understand overall performance. For example, the default channel group includes ‘Organic Search’, ‘Paid Search’, ‘Social’ and ‘Email’, which automatically combines pre-defined sources and mediums.
Engaged Sessions: Google Analytics will report an engaged session when a session lasts longer than ten seconds, when a session includes at least one conversion, or when a session includes two or more page views. You can adjust the amount of time for a session to be considered engaged. To do this, you need to open the data stream, select ‘Configure Tag Settings’, then ‘Show All’, and choose ‘Adjust Session Timeout’.
Medium: Medium is one of the dimensions (along with source, campaign and channel) for reporting and analyzing how people found your website. Medium tells you how the message was communicated. For example, ‘organic’ for free search traffic, ‘cpc’ for cost-per-click and ‘referral’ for inbound links from other websites.
Page View: A page view is reported when a user on your website has viewed a page. Pages are ordered by popularity based on views in the Google Analytics pages and screens report by default. This allows you to see which content is being viewed most often.
Session: A single visit to your website, consisting of one or more events, including page views, purchases, or other events. A session is reported when the session_start event is automatically collected by Google Analytics. The default session timeout is 30 minutes, which means that if someone is inactive on your website for over 30 minutes, a new session will be reported if they perform another action, for example, viewing another page.
Source: Source is one of the dimensions (along with medium, campaign and channel) for reporting and analyzing how people found your website. Source tells you where the message was seen. For example, a source of ‘google’ would indicate that someone found your website after searching on Google. Source can be used in combination with medium for more granular insights. For example, a source of ‘google’ and a medium of ‘cpc’ would be reported for paid clicks from your Google Ads campaigns. See also medium.
Total Users: The total number of users based on the selected date range. For example, if you have January selected as a date range and there are 1,000 users for that date range, this value would be reported as the total number of users. Also known as unique users. See also users.
User Engagement: User engagement measures how long people have viewed your content, including pages and screens. Google Analytics calculates time using the user_engagement event, which is automatically collected when someone navigates to another page on your website or leaves your website. Time is only counted when the page or screen is visible. For example, when a tab is hidden, this time is not included in the user engagement metric. See also average engagement time.
User: An individual who interacts with your website or app. Each user can visit your website multiple times. For example, one user could create three sessions on your website, with each session containing multiple page views. By default, each unique device ID will be counted as a separate user, which means someone visiting your website on multiple devices (each with their device ID) will mean more than one user is reported. The user ID feature allows you to track unique individuals that identify themselves on multiple devices. See also device ID and User ID.
Views: Reports the total number of times events have been collected. For example, a user who navigates to the ‘about us’ page, then the ‘contact us’ page, and then back to the ‘about us’ page will result in two views of the ‘about us’ page and one view of the ‘contact us’ page. See also reporting view.
Views per User: This metric is calculated by dividing the total number of views by the total number of users.