How much traffic did you get on the website yesterday?
The topic of this video is going to be how we can find this out in Google Analytics.
All the more coming up.
Hey there measure geeks.
Julian here back with another video.
I'm actually starting a new series here where we're going to answer some common questions
with the help of Google Analytics.
Now, a question is always very important because when we start our analysis process, we want
to start out strong with a question in mind.
So we actually get a result from our analysis.
If you don't have a question and just look through the reports within Google Analytics,
you find yourself very confused, very overwhelmed with all that data without having a real result.
So we'll start out with a question.
And the first question we want to tackle is how much traffic did I get on the website
yesterday?
This might be a question that your boss asked you, a client asked you or yourself as yourself.
So let's open up Google Analytics and find out what we can do about this question and
where we can find the answer.
All right to get started, I would recommend that you open up your Google Analytics account.
Or you can also get access to the same account that I have access too here.
It's the Google merchandise demo store, which you can get access through this link on the
help section of Google Analytics.
I will link this up down below as well.
And then we are entering Google Analytics through the home screen.
And on the home screen, we already get some data and some answers to our questions which
is, what traffic did we get yesterday.
So we have this big overview already here.
And if you hover over this chart, we see that this line chart shows us the different dates.
And yesterday was Monday, June 3, and we can see here that the users were 2330.
So really quick answer to our question already.
And on this home screen, there are a lot of questions that are answered here.
So we have right here, how do you acquire users, we get a breakdown right here, or how
are active users trending over time.
Now, these are great shortcuts.
But if you want to look at data more in depth and especially data about the traffic, then
we might want to look at the audience report.
So we'll go over here to the report section.
And actually click on overview for the audience section.
We get a nice line chart right here.
And some more overview data.
Let's talk through this first of all.
Again, we are seeing here, our different users trending over time, and the familiar number
2030 from 2330 from yesterday.
Now, if you want to narrow down our focus here and only want to focus on the day yesterday,
we can go up to the calendar section at any time and choose a custom date range.
So yesterday was the 10th, we can click on the here or on the top here there are Quick
Select menus for today or yesterday.
So let's go on that apply this and it will zoom in.
And this chart will change to show us the hours of when we got these users.
So we're looking here at the user metric.
And this really brings us to our first distinction that we want to make when we look at the traffic
that we got yesterday.
Because traffic doesn't equal traffic, there is no one definition for traffic.
The way Google Analytics works is that there's a tracking code installed on your website.
And each time the user goes from page to page data is sent over to Google Analytics.
This data is commonly referred to as page views.
So each page that is open on your website generates a page view.
This will obviously differ from websites that are more prone to generate a lot of pages
views than a very short informational site where the user gets the information on, for
example, just one page.
So it may not be what you're looking for.
But Google Analytics actually gives you different models of looking at the data.
The second model that we can look at are the sessions.
Now, Sessions is a grouping of different page views together in a timeframe.
This time frame by default is 25 minutes.
So let's say a user comes to your website, looks at a couple of pages, then leaves the
website and in the evening, reenters your website and looks at a couple of more pages.
Then you will have counted two sessions and a couple of page views each time.
And that's why it's logical that the page views are far higher than the sessions as
they're grouped together within that metric.
Now above that all we have the user metric.
The user metric is calculated by looking at the cookies or the user ID of the user was
entered the website.
And if it's still the same from his first visit then this will be grouped as one user.
So you could imagine that the one user that we just talked about has two sessions and
a couple of page views.
But it's just one user.
Now, these different metrics are actually called scopes as well in Google Analytics,
as we can attach different data to them.
So a page view can carry metric, like how long the user was on that particular page
itself, we can look at the sessions, and that relation can look at the bounce rate.
And when we look at users we can determine is as a new user or an old user.
So it's always important to look at your data through the right lens.
And traffic isn't the same as maybe some other traffic.
Depending on who you're reporting to or the comparability later on.
You might want to choose one or the other as your KPI for further reporting.
Now that we have seen here that we had 2330 users, how is this actually meaningful to
us?
Well, the first thing when we talk about traffic is that there is a time component instead
of our question yesterday.
Yesterday was a Monday so I'd like to know know if there's numbers high or low.
Let's compare it to the previous Monday.
Now, I can click here on compared to, and if I choose previous period, it actually takes
the day before which was Sunday.
So we could gauge if the traffic went up or down during these days on the Monday it actually
increased.
But let's do for better comparison, a comparison to the actual Monday, the week before.
Let's apply this.
And we can see we had a slight increase of the overall metrics right here.
But this could obviously be more significant if you had a sale running or more people coming
to your websites for a marketing campaign.
Now let's look at this data.
Actually, not the week before, but let's put it in one year before.
So take this metric here and put this in for 2018.
Apply this.
And here we go.
We see a more significant increase in traffic as opposed to our last year's performance.
Now there's tons more question that I could ask here about my data set and dig deeper
from the traffic that we got yesterday.
For example, where did the traffic come from, how did it convert, and that the users actually
reached a goal that I set out for them to reach?
But these are questions for our next videos.
And I hope you are now able to answer the question, how much traffic did I have yesterday?
And know how you can compare and actually gauge the differences between the different
metrics that you have available for answering your questions.
All right, so there you have it.
This is how you can see how much traffic that you get on the website yesterday.
Now you might find my question a bit more nuanced than what you have thought.
But I had these many visits or sessions or users.
So it gets really complicated very fast.
And Google Analytics, it needs to be complicated because it's a complex world out there.
It is not one answer that you can give with your data in Google Analytics.
I hope you understood this and took this away from this little tutorial.
Now, you might also have noticed that you have tons more questions, I would encourage
you to dig through some more reports in Google Analytics and find out the answers to your
questions.
We have tons more questions that will come up on this series.
So definitely subscribe to the channel right over there.
Or check out our other videos right over there because there are new ones coming out all
the time.
Now, my name is Julian, see you in the next one.