Table 2

Glossary of Google Analytics terms

Google term		Explanation	In lay terms
Direct clicks Traffic that does not originate from search-engine results or a referring link in a domain is identified as ‘direct’23	Visits	Number of times people viewed the site	Direct hits on the specific Cochrane summaries (not overall Cochrane site hits)—without being directed via our Tweets. Here people have intentionally gone to the website to look at the summaries without our encouragement.
All clicks The overview of all clicks onto the website of interest23	Page views	Number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.	Once on the target (summaries) page a person can click around the site and back and forward to the page. So if they hit the target page, click to another within the site and then return to the target page, that equals 3. This is the same as ‘Direct-click visits’ but includes other ways people have got to the Cochrane summaries page, for example, directed via Twitter or URLs they have clicked on from another website, etc.
	Unique page views	Number of visits during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique page view is counted for each page URL + page title combination.	The number of individual (non-duplicate) visits to the target (Cochrane summaries) page. This is similar to Page views but will also look at the IP address—counting it as one view from a computer even if the user accesses the page multiple times in the same session (30 min).
	Average time on page	Average amount of time visitors spend viewing a specified page or set of pages	This is the time spent on one web page—in this case the target (summaries) page. A website may have multiple web pages.
	Entrances	Number of times visitors entered your site through a specified page or set of pages	This is the number of times someone entered the summaries page through the Twitter page.
	Bounce rate	% of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left the site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).	This may be an indication of getting what they need off the target (summary) page—or, alternatively—not getting anything they need and having no will to proceed. We converted this to binary for analysis: 1=all visits were single page, 0=other
Twitter referrals Clicks originating from a third-party website where a web link links to the page of interest24 25	Page views	Number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.	The subset of ‘All clicks target page views’—only ones from Twitter. This may include Cochrane Schizophrenia Group tweets, retweets or other Twitter's user tweets whereby the page URL has been tweeted. We were also using Wiebo.
Events—an action tracked on the website—for example, exit to Cochrane Library	Total events	Total events is the number of times events occurred.	This is the total number of times an external link is clicked