Google Analytics Stats Questions

What numbers are good and bad?

[canopenerheart]

I am interning in web marketing and am still in training. Unfortunately, we're so busy at my company that they don't have time to teach me much. I'm glad this site exists, because in the 24 hours I've been on it, I've learned more about SEO than I have in the month and a half I've been an intern.

Anyway, I'm very experienced with setting up analytics and finding the information that my supervisor needs at this point, but I am curious about what all these numbers mean. I would love to be able to look at the dashboard of an analytics account and have it mean something to me.
Here's an actual example from a (fairly large and popular) site we have on analytics:

visits: 90,133
pageviews: 92,571
pages/visit: 1.03
bounce rate: 97.52%
avg. time on site: 00:00:02
%new visits: 97.24%

It would be great if people could just tell me what they are thinking about the site based on this information so I can get an idea of how the numbers relate to each other. And any other tips on interpreting analytics would be appreciated as well. Thanks!

[ColinG]

I would consider these very poor results.

The 97% bounce rate means that the person lands on a page and goes nowhere.

This may be OK if the pages landed on are the only page you want them to see. This needs more review as to the page content and why people are coming to the page.

[dcheney]

Avg time on site and pages/visit seem to suggest that folks look at one page and immediately leave - on average within 2 seconds.

The bounce rate seems to confirm this.

The % of new visits is also scary - essentially 97% of the folks (which only saw 1 page to begin with), don't come back.

IMO, at first glance, the site is getting a lot of quick traffic, but the site is so bad that as soon as they see the site, they run and never come back.

[ColinG]

The time on page is meaningless - Google can only track time when you go to the next page - one page hits show as zero time even if they user spent 3 minutes there.

This is one reason why tracking outbound clicks from the page will have a major impact on bounce rate and would give Google Analytics reason to see the site as useful.

[valituguran]

visits: 90,133
pageviews: 92,571

The number of page views is very close to the number of visits meaning that the surfers visiting your site also leave it after viewing only 1 page (this is also the definition of the bounce: a visit with only 1 page viewed).

Unless your site is a blog like site where people come, read an article, and leave then you are really scaring them away somehow.

PS: The analytics software I use: [advancedwebstats.com ]