How GA calculates metrics for accounts
The new account interface to Google Analytics (announced in October and rolled out to everyone over the last few months) is a really nice improvement, because it allows you to see, at a glance, how different accounts or profiles are doing and compare them to each other without having to click through to the reports for each profile.
Given that you might have lots of different profiles in an account — even for multiple sites — what exactly does it mean that an account has X visits?
The answer is fairly straightforward, but first you have to understand something about how profiles work. If you’ve ever created a profile, you’ll have seen the following question:
You can create profiles for different sites or multiple profiles for the same site. (Different sites have different tracking code numbers. Multiple profiles for the same site have the same number and receive the same data, but you can filter the data in different ways to see it differently.)
This is how you’ll see profiles listed within an account in the new interface:
Notice that they’re sorted by site, then each profile for that site is listed.
When Google Analytics totals up the visits and other metrics for the account, the profile with the highest number of visits wins for each site. Then all sites in the account are totaled.
So, from the screenshot above, the total should be 7835 (the profile with the highest visits for the first site) + 1419 (the only profile for the second site) = 9254. And, voilà:
So this can be a really nice way to compare accounts, but you should be aware of exactly how those numbers are totaled up so you know what to expect.
January 2nd, 2009 at 8:40 am
visits…ok. but what about time on site and bounce rate? I have a profile with 3 sites inside (not copy-profile, three different domains), and time on site displayed in first screen isn’t sum neither average of three
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:12 am
Marco —
It’s the visit-weighted average of the three sites. That is, it’s not simply (time on site 1 + time on site 2 + time on site 3)/3, but more like a recalculation of the average time across all of the sites (still using those “winning” profiles with the highest visits). So it’s (total time in visits across all 3 sites)/(total number of visits across all three sites).
Bounce rate is similarly recalculated across the sites — (total single-page visits across all 3 sites)/(total visits across all three sites).
January 13th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Nice post, i agree that the new method to display multiple GA accounts is quite useful, and over the christmas/new year break it was interesting to see that most had similar drops in traffic, but the increases after the new year are not as consistent with some growing but multiples and others just returning to previous levels.
The only issue is that on a top down view, you cant change the date comparison set, just daily/weekly/monthly/yearly.