The Scope of Visitor Engagement in Google Analytics

Google Analytics uses a model that they refer to as the “scope of visitor engagement” that is comprised of 3 levels…

• Visitor – At this level, we are tracking the people visiting your website
• Session – At this level, we are tracking the period of time which people are on the website
• Page – At this level, we are tracking the pages that the visitors are looking at through either a page view or an event

Each visitor that comes to your website has these 3 levels of interaction with your website’s web pages when you are using Google Analytics to track visitors.  Another bonus to having 3 separate levels are that it allows you when using custom variables to focus on a specific level and depending on which level you are interested in the following custom variable are available…

• Visitor-level Custom Variables
• Session-level Custom Variables
• Page-level Custom Variables

So, now that we know this I am going to tie it all together for you.  Every visit made to your website generates a session and in this session the visitor visits various web pages on your website.  Using custom variables allows you to drill into specific levels of visitor interaction and gain a deeper appreciation of how customers access your website.