Examples: Session Application Funnel report data analysis

You can use the Session Application Funnel report to monitor branding initiatives and investigate trends.

Analyze marketing exposure online: The ratio of Direct Load Sessions (sessions where users directly type your site's URL into their browsers) to all sessions is evidence of the success of branding initiatives. If you see this ratio increase over time, you are successfully promoting your brands and traffic is now coming directly to your site. If this ratio is decreasing or the number of Direct Load Sessions itself is decreasing, you should use the Marketing reports to further analyze how you can increase your brand recognition.

If you have recently increased your marketing exposure online, you should expect Referral and Search Referral Sessions to increase. However, in the absence of an increasing marketing spend, these numbers should remain constant or should decrease as brand recognition increases. If these session metrics are not trending as predicted, you might want to investigate this behavior using the Marketing reports.

Investigate trends in average session time: Trends in the Average Session Time metrics can be indicative of the ease of use of the site. The goal with these metrics is to increase the Average New Session Time, meaning that new visitors are spending longer on the site and hopefully doing more in that time, and to decrease the Average Repeat Session Time, meaning that repeat visitors are finding their desired content faster. To improve these trends, use the TopLine Metrics and Page Categories reports to discover where time is spent on the website.

The Page Views/Session metric is also useful to trend over time. An increasing trend means that sessions are browsing deeper into your website. If this number is decreasing or you want to improve this ratio's growth rate you should conduct further analysis using the Page Categories and Clickstream reports to determine where and why sessions are departing.