Google Analytics - my continuing adventures

[mccormackmorrison]

Hello

I'd appreciate views of the various metrics I'm struggling with in GA:

I've run 2 different reports that provide 2 different outputs.

1. In Standard Reporting you can report in Traffic Sources on Organic Search by Keyword, which returns the number of Visits.

2. In Custom Reporting you can define the Keyword dimension and the Organic Searches metric, which returns the number of Organic Searches.

This returns 2 different numbers. For example, over the last month for a given term report 1 returns 77,306 visits whilst report 2 returns 52,589 organic searches.

I have found some definitions:

• "Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site."
• "Organic Searches: number of organic searches that happened within a session. This metric is search engine agnostic."

My understanding of these definitions is that report 2 should return a larger value than report 1 rather than what is happening (i.e. report 1 returns a greater value than report 2).

Does anyone have a greater understanding of what these mean and relate to? Does anyone have any views on which metric is more useful?

Thanks

Neil

[EricaMcGillivray]

Hi Neil,

The reason #2 is lower because a "session" is a period of time. A session is either 30 minutes or once a person closes her/his browser.

For instance, if you had a cupcake shop and I Googled "cupcakes" and came to your site. Then popped out and Googled "buttercream cupcakes" and came back to your site in less than 30 minutes without closing my browser, my searches would count as 2 in #1 and 1 in #2.

Hope that helps!