Google Analytics Definitions

What Does It All Mean?

Google Analytics has a large set of metrics and dimensions which provide a wealth of data about your site. For each website in CHSSWeb, we produce a report containing several metrics that we feel site owners and managers will find useful. This page provides a brief explanation of each metric. We hope this will make using and interacting with your analytics more approachable. If you have questions about analytics, please contact us.

Page path and screen class

Page path is the portion of the URL after the hostname and before any query strings or additional parameters. for example, the pagePath portion of https://www.example.com/store/contact-us?query_string=true is /store/contact-us.

Views

The number of page views for your web site. Repeated views for a single user are counted.

Users

This metric represents the number of unique visitors to your site during a given period of time. A single user can account for multiple sessions.

Views per user

The average number of page views per user.

Average Engagement Time

The average time that your website was in focus in a user's browser was in the foreground of a user's device.

Average engagement time = total user engagement durations / number of active users

Note: Average Engagement Time in GA4 is measured differently from the old Universal Analytics metrics, Average  Session Duration and Average Time on Page. In GA4, the "Engagement Time" metric is intended to offer a more accurate representation of user interaction than the old metrics. This is because "Engagement Time" counts only when users are actively engaging with the page, such as when they click, scroll, or type.  For a more detailed explanation of the differences between average engagement time and average time on page (GA4 vs. UA), click here..

Event Count

The number of times users triggered an event.

An event allows you to measure a specific interaction or occurrence on your website. For example, you can use an event to measure when someone loads a page or clicks a link.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. An engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews. Bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. Learn more about Bounce Rate >>