The truth is, these concepts are pretty straightforward but it’s also easy to overlook the details of how each metric should be read and understood. I will be focusing on the Google Analytics tool since that is what I feel most people are using. However, many of the terms I will cover do apply to any analytical tool.

Today we are keeping it nice and simple and going for the first term that anyone should know when opening up Google Analytics: Metric.

Metric - is a numeric counting of something specific happening on your site. There are different metrics depending the report you are looking at and choosing the right metric based on the report is important.

Also, some metrics are shown in percentage to show you the relevancy of a single counting is comparison to the total. This makes the information easier to digest and steers us away from ‘isolated metrics’.

To get a quick definition of a metric use the little question mark next to it, so you can get a quick definition of a specific metric.

Another useful thing to use is how your reports are filtered, based on the metric. If you click inside that metric box, it will actually restack the report so you are seeing the data organized and filtered by that metric. This is important when you start to dig into your data and view it from different perspectives. You can change how the values stack up and you'd be surprised how the same values compete against each other.

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In the next post we will be getting deeper in some of these metrics. Please leave comments if you have any questions!

Annndd ... next up is Day 5: Analyzing your site traffic! If you've been itching to get into your reporting analysis, this is the day for you.

photo credit: IMG_0358 via photopin(license)