Two keys metrics in Google Analytics that are very widely used, particularly by occasional users, are Traffic Sources and Bounce Rate. Both are useful for example when applied to individual pages but they need to be used with an understanding of their limitations. Direct Traffic is defined as ” people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or typed your site URL into their browser “.  While that is true Direct Traffic can also include any visitor that the system can not identify the source of. Examples would be visitors who came from a 301 redirect, from a Campaign eg banner, email where the campaign links were  not appended or from a visitor who is using the Private Browsing feature of Explorer 8.  In order to ensure that the correct marketing channel gets credit for bringing visitors Google Analytics stores for 6 months the Traffic Source the visitor first came from ( in the _utmz cookie). So if a visitor finds a page using Organic search ALL visits subsequently made by this visitor ( actually all visits made from the same browser on the same machine ), EVEN if she comes from a bookmark that she made after her first visit, will register as coming from Organic.

Bounce Rate is defined as  ” …the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page “. So it does not take into account the number of Page Views by Visitors who did not land on that page. For example a page may have 5 direct visits and 4 leave immediately ie a Bounce Rate of 80%. However that page may also have 200 Page Views from other visitors to the site. The average time on page may be long. That piece of data gives a very different `spin` on  how that page is performing.