Recently I've been talking more and more with clients about tracking "Quality Web Users."

In Google Analytics, we're all pretty familiar with "Users" (the amount of people who go to your site during a particular time period) and "Sessions" (the amount of visits that any number of users have on your site during a particular time period).

I call these "Traffic Metrics."

And we're somewhat familiar with Bounce Rate, which is basically the percentage of users that enter your site, then immediately leave after not engaging at all with the page they entered on.

And "time on site" and "pages per visit" are very self explanatory.

However, what I started thinking about in around May of 2015, is what would happen if we combined Traffic and Engagement metrics into something called "Quality Web Users."

Why? Because in my mind, "bounces" shouldn't count, so you should weed out the bounce rate visits.

Boom, done. Quality Web Users.

Also, to me it made sense to track users that spend double the average time on site, and double the average amount of pages viewed per visit.

Because wouldn't you want to know if a user came and viewed six pages when your average pages per visit is three?

Wouldn't you be happy to know, also that this visitor came from a boosted Facebook post that you spent $20 on?

Also, wouldn't it make sense to know that your Google Adwords ads have only generated 20 Quality Web Users after paying $100 for the ads, when Facebook has generated 100 Quality Web Users for $50?

Then, in your 30 Minutes Per Month in Google Analytics, you check for these things to use data to drive your next marketing actions.

For more on Quality Web Users, check this out, and for how to set up Goals in Google Analytics to track your Quality Web Users, check this out.

Lastly, if you still don't understand the concept of why a Quality Web User is more likely to purchase from you than a regular user, think of it this way...

You're walking downtown trying to buy a gift for your friend. You stop in a store. You can immediately tell that the store you walked in doesn't have anything they'd like. You leave immediately.

You are a user, but you bounced. You shouldn't really count to that business.

Then, you walk into a store and you love a few things so you look around. You don't buy anything because you still need to talk to your spouse about the decision. You have a good feeling you'll come back later to buy something.

A user that does that, is a "Quality Web User." They're the ones who spent double the amount of time on the site, or at least didn't bounce.

Taking the time to set up this tracking in Google Analytics, is important to your data driven marketing decisions moving forward.