This video provides a brief overview of how to use the
Google Analytics interface.
If you're new to Google Analytics, or you'd like to
pick up a few tips on how to use some of the different
features, this video is a good place to start.
When you first sign in to your Google Analytics account,
you'll see this screen, which shows a list of your profiles.
If you're just starting to use Google Analytics, you'll
probably just have one profile.
Click 'view reports' to get started.
Let's look at the dashboard, which is the first report
you'll see.
The dashboard is where you put all the summary information
about your site that you want to see at a glance.
To add a report to the dashboard, just go to the
report that you want to add, and then click 'add to
dashboard'.
And here, going back to the dashboard, if I scroll to the
bottom, is the traffic sources overview that I just added.
On the dashboard itself, you can position the report
summaries however you like, and delete the ones that you
don't need.
One nice feature about the dashboard is that it lets you
jump directly to the specific report you've saved.
So here, I've jumped directly from my dashboard to a full
report on California.
So now might be a good time to go to your most important
reports and put them on your dashboard.
In the left hand navigation, you'll see that your reports
are organized into groups.
Anything about visitors--
where they're located geographically, what their
language preferences are, how frequently they come to your
site, and which kinds of computers and
browsers they use--
is found in the 'visitors' section.
The 'traffic sources' section shows you how
people got to your site.
This is where to look if you want to see which keywords
people used, or which ads they click on.
Content is all about the pages on your site.
Which ones were most popular, which ones served as entry
pages to your site, and which ones were the pages from which
people exited your site.
If you've defined conversion goals, the goals reports show
you conversions and conversion rates.
A goal is a website page which a visitor reaches once they
have made a purchase, or completed another desired
action such as a registration or a download.
Defining goals and monitoring conversions is an important
way to measure how well a site contributes to your business
objectives.
The ecommerce section contains your merchandising,
transaction, and revenue activity reports.
You don't have to use the left navigation to get to reports.
The reports themselves contain links and suggestions to help
you discover new information.
The active date range is always displayed at the upper
right of your reports.
Click the arrow next to displayed date range, and then
type in your dates, or use the calendar or the timeline to
select a date range.
Click 'apply'.
You can compare two date ranges against each other.
Under 'comparison', select 'date range'.
And here's a tip.
Instead of, for example, just comparing September with
August, I'm going to line up the dates so that I can
compare weekdays with weekdays and weekends with weekends.
Since the first day of September is a Friday, I'm
going to shift my 30 day comparison period so that it
starts on Friday, July 28th, instead of August 1st. Next
I'm going to activate the 'comparitive date range'
option here.
Now, when I look at the graph, I can make meaningful day by
day comparisons, comparing Fridays to Fridays, Saturdays
to Saturdays, and so forth.
On reports that contain graphs, you can select the
metric that you want to graph over time.
In this report, we're graphing visits.
So let's change it to 'average pages per visit'.
Or, you can compare two metrics against each other.
For example, here, we're comparing average pages per
visit versus the Goal 1 conversion rate.
There is the 'average pages per visit' in blue, and the
Goal 1 conversion rate in yellow.
Unless you're comparing two date ranges, you have the
option of comparing metrics against the site average.
Here we're looking at the average pages
per visit for AdWords--
that's the blue line--
versus average pages per visit for the average visitor--
that's the thin gray line.
Most reports have a scorecard, and then a
table below the scorecard.
The scorecard summarizes all the data that's
included in the table.
So here, for example, we're looking at AdWords traffic
from three keywords.
There were 57 visits from people who came in on these
keywords, and on average, each visitor saw 18 pages, and
spent about a minute and a half on the site.
Most of these visits were from new visitors, people who had
never been to the site before.
And over 19% of them left after seen only one page.
Looking down at the table you can see the same data broken
down for each keyword.
To look at your conversions and conversion rates, you
click the 'goal conversion' tab.
To look at your ecommerce activity, you click the
ecommerce tab.
The 'clicks' tab is unique to the AdWords reports, and it
shows you AdWords-specific metrics that we'll look at in
detail in another video.
You can always get an explanation of any one of the
metrics on the scorecard by clicking the
question mark bubble.
You can segment table data in different ways using the
segment pull down.
So if you want to see it as AdWords traffic broken out by
city, you just select 'city' from the pull down.
You can use the buttons at the upper right of the scorecard
to visualize your data, as a pie chart, a bar graph, a
comparison to site metrics, or as an aggregate summary.
Finally, you can facilitate information sharing and
collaborative decision-making by emailing reports.
To email a report, click the 'email' button that appears at
the top of each report.
You can send the report immediately, or set up a
regularly scheduled email.
Or, you could add the report to an email that you've
already scheduled.
So now might be a good time to try creating a few scheduled
emails from some of your most important reports.
Exporting data into other formats is another tool for
sharing and collaborating.
To export a report, you just click the 'export' button at
the top of the report and select the format you want.
And here's a tip.
If you want to create a high-resolution, print=ready
presentation, export your report to PDF.
The PDF reports are vector-based, and so they
scale to a large size and still look great.