Site Engagement

The Behavior > Site Engagement report is pulled from your Google Analytics account. To display the Site Engagement report in ViewLift Tools, you must log in to your GA account from the ViewLift dashboard. See the FAQ section on the Dashboard article for more info.

Site Engagement Overall report in ViewLift Tools

Overall - The number of Pageviews per Session on your site over a chosen date range. To view the other metrics reports, use the Metrics menu. 

Metrics menu	Description
Pageviews per Session	Average number of pages a user views in a specific session. This metric is calculated by dividing the number of page views by the total number of sessions. For example, if your website has an average page per session of 5, this means the average user visits five pages before leaving your website. For more information on this metric, see this  Where can you access Page views per session report in Google Analytics? You can access the Behavior reports from Acquisition > Overview in the left sidebar of your Google Analytics dashboard.Acquisition report in Google Analytics
Bounce Rate	A bounce rate is calculated when a person visits a page on your site and does nothing on the page before leaving.  According to Google, "A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session."  So, if a person leaves a page without performing a specific action, such as buying a subscription, creating an account, or clicking on a link, that's a bounce.
Avg. Session Duration	The average length of a session. The average session duration is measured by dividing the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) by the total number of sessions during that same time range. For example, say in one hour you had three people visit your website: Visitor #1 spent 200 seconds on your site.  Visitor #2 spent 50 seconds on your site.  Visitor #3 spent 450 seconds on your site.  To calculate the average session duration, Google Analytics adds the duration of each session (200 + 50 + 450) in that time frame and divides the sum (700) by the number of user sessions (3) in that same time frame to get an average session duration of 233.3 seconds, or 3 minutes and 48 seconds. Where can you see Avg. Session Duration in Google Analytics? Navigate to Audience > Overview. For more information Avg. Session Duration, see this article in Hotjar. Select Average Session Duration from the drop-down
Sessions per User	Per Google Analytics, Users are the number of Unique users that visit your site during the specified date range. Sessions per User is simply the nth number of sessions of a unique user. The report for the Count Of Sessions (Sessions per User) is available at Audience > Behavior > Frequency and recency. To learn more about session frequency, read this article.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Session in Google Analytics?

A session in Google Analytics is simply a visit to your website. A session starts when a user views a page on your site and ends either when they leave your website or after 30 minutes of inactivity. Everything a user does during that visit is counted as a single session.

What's the difference between average session duration and average time on the page?

To calculate the average session duration for Google Analytics is a bit tricky because to consider the time you've spent on the last page during a session, you must take an action on that page (clicking a link, playing a video, and so on). For example, when a user clicks on one of your video pages from search, the session timer starts. It continues when that user clicks on a link to another video page. But unless the user takes another action on that second video page, the time spent on that video page isn’t counted as part of the session duration.

Instead, the session duration would only count the time between when the first page loaded and when the user clicked on the link to go to the second video page. For that reason, it’s often important to compare the average session duration metric with average time on page.

Platform

The Platform tab provides the analytics for all the platforms you've configured in your Search Console. In ViewLift, you can view these reports for the chosen user metrics in the Metrics menu. Use the date presets to visualize the reports in the day, week, and month format. 

For a complete breakdown of the Site Engagement reports, ViewLift recommends you track your Google Search Console. 

Traffic channel

This report is a good starting point to track where your traffic is coming from. Traffic Channel provides a high-level view of the sources of traffic to your website. Traffic sources are categorized into paid search, referrals, organic search, direct, email, social, direct, and so on.

Types of channels

• Referrals: This traffic comes from websites that point link to your website (not directly from search engines). Example: A movie review site links to your website and the readers click on that link and visit your website. Another example is the refer and earn program. 
• Organic search: Traffic that comes from search engines, but excludes all paid search engine traffic.
• Paid search: Traffic that comes from your paid search ads in search engines and search services such as AOL and Ask.
• Direct: Traffic coming from people directly typing in your website URL or through bookmarks saved in browsers. 
• Email: Traffic coming from email marketing campaigns. Make sure to tag them using UTM codes in order to show any traffic from Emails.
• Social: Traffic coming from social networks.

Where can you see Traffic Channels report in Google Analytics?

Navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Clicking on each channel lets you drill down to specific reports. 

Drilled-down report for all traffic channels in your GA console