This guide covers the overview page of the GA4 dashboard. This page includes sessions, visitor data, devices, feedback and a top 5 summary of search, grants, publications, news and downloads.
On this page:
Sessions data
Total sessions: total visits to the page(s) or site section(s) that consist of one or more events, such as page views, link clicks, page scrolls, video views, and form completions.
VPS sessions: sessions conducted by VPS staff if they’re using a Cenitex VPN or working from a VPS office.
Sessions per day: total sessions divided by the number of days (the date range can be selected in the top banner of the dashboard).
Bounce rate: percentage of sessions that last less than 10 seconds, do not include a conversion, and/or only include viewing a single page. Unlike other metrics, the lower the bounce rate is, the better.
Sessions with search: sessions of visitors who performed an internal search while on the page(s) or site section(s).
Visitor data
New vs returning visitors: comparison between visitors who have never visited the page(s) before (new) and visitors who have visited the page at least once before (returning).
Devices: type of device visitors are using when they visited the page(s) – desktop, mobile or tablet.
Social network referrals: social networks that are a source of the traffic coming to the page(s).
Feedback – Was this page helpful?: percentage of feedback received from visitors answering a form asking whether the page they visited was useful or not. You can find this on the bottom of nearly all vic.gov.au pages:
You might see other types of feedback forms on vic.gov.au pages, such as the Have you found what you were looking for today example (see below screenshot). These are extensions from Hotjar, so this data is not recorded on GA.
Top 5 data: pages, referral sources, internal search terms and Google search terms
Top 5 pages: pages that have the highest number of unique pageviews (repeat views by the same user during the same session are not counted).
Top 5 referral sources: sites that have referred visitors through a link, based on unique pageviews.
Top 5 search terms - internal: terms visitors used when performing an internal search, based on total unique searches.
Top 5 search terms - Google: keywords visitors used in a Google search to land on vic.gov.au, based on URL clicks. Note: This data is for the entire vic.gov.au website and can’t be filtered down to specific site sections or pages.
Grants, publications, news and downloads data
Top 5 grants: based on unique pageviews.
Top 5 publications: based on unique pageviews.
Top 5 news items: based on unique pageviews.
Top 5 downloads: based on unique events (format varies).
Timeline comparisons
Sessions - weekly comparison: week-to-week comparison of sessions. Since it is weekly, make sure your date range is set to a minimum of 2 weeks for this data to be useful.
Sessions - daily comparison: day-to-day sessions comparison.
