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Google Analytics

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Part One: 1. What is Google Analytics?2. Creating an account3. Navigating the interface4. Understanding the Core Concepts5. Types of Reports

Welcome to Google Analytics!

Google Analytics allows you to analyze your website traffic, and tells you about who your visitors are.

Google Analytics can tell you:

● How many people visit your website

● Where your visitors live and basic demographic information

● What websites send traffic to your website

● What marketing tactics drive the most traffic to your website

● Which pages on your website are most popular

● And more!

Google Analytics is a free service that helps you analyze visitor traffic, and gives you a complete picture of who your audience is and how they are interacting with your site. Through various reports, you can find out the routes people take to reach your site, the content they viewed, and the devices they use to get there.

How does Google Analytics data collection work?To track your website activity, Google Analytics uses a small block of code (which you or your web developer will add to every page of your website that you want to track).

Some data comes from the website, like which urls are being viewed. Other data comes from what browser the viewer is using, what language their viewing your site in, and so forth.

This code can also track how the user got to your site, and how long they stay there.

All of this information is then processed by Google Analytics. After being processed, the information is sent to you in the form of reports.

A Google Analytics account is the “container” for your analytics data, whether you’re collecting data from multiple websites, or just one.

Creating an Account

What are your marketing/website goals?

Take a minute to think about what you’d like to accomplish using Google Analytics.

Do you want to find out more about your website visitors? Do you want to increase your website traffic? Do you want to figure out what’s not working on your site? Write down a few initial goals.

Creating an Account

Within your account, you can have one or

more properties. A “property” is a

website (or mobile app). Each property

gets a unique Tracking ID (which collects

data from every page of your website in

which it is inserted). The Tracking ID tells

Google Analytics to collect and store that

data together.

Creating an Account

View: Within each property, you can

create different “views” for your data. A

view is how you’ll access reports. For

example, there is one view for ALL of

your traffic by default when you create a

property. This is the unfiltered analytics

data from your website.

Creating an Account

Once you delete a view, it’s gone forever - so be sure to keep this original unfiltered view!

Creating an Account

To set up an account:

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics/. Click “Sign In” to sign in with your Google account, or create a new Google Account.

A Google account is not the same as a Google Analytics account. Your Google account contains (or is the umbrella) for other Google services, such as Google Analytics or Adwords.

If you’re registering Google Analytics for business purposes, it’s recommended to use a business Google account.

Creating an Account

2. Select whether you are tracking a website or mobile app. In this course, we’ll be focusing on tracking website data.

3. Fill out the next section: - Account Name - Website name - Website URL- Industry Category: Allows Google to provide “Benchmarking” for you. Benchmarking allows you to look at how your site is performing compared to others in your category. - Time zone- Data sharing settings: It’s recommended to leave these checked, as it will give you access to aggregate data, tech support, and account specialists.

Creating an Account

4. Once you complete the above steps, you should be provided with your unique

Tracking ID code. This is the code that you’ll need to copy and paste into every

page of your website. To find your tracking code, choose “Admin” at the top of

the screen, and under the “Property” column, select “Tracking Info”, and

“Tracking Code”.

Creating an Account

To insert your code into your website, do one of the following:

a. Send the code to your website developer/administrator. Many

people do not have access to their website code, or do not edit their

code themselves. If this is your situation, send the code to the

person(s) who manage your website, and ask them to insert it into the

pages you want to track.

b. If you have access to your website’s html code, you can use your

html editor (such as Sublime Editor) to insert the code. Open each html

file for each individual web page, and place the code that you copied

directly above the ending head tag. Save and reupload to your web

server.

Creating an Account

Navigating the Interface

This is your administrative homepage. Here you can make changes to your account, access your tracking information and property settings, and more.


After logging in, you’ll be taken to the Reporting tab (at the top of the screen).


The “Reporting” tab is highlighted in blue, which shows us that this is the tab currently selected.


At the top of the screen, you have your main navigation links. To the left is “Home”, which takes you back to the list of all of your accounts and properties. The “Reporting” section gives you access to all of your reports and dashboards.


“Customization” gives you access to any custom reports you’ve created, and “Admin” is where you manage Google Analytics -- where you can create new properties, edit user permissions, and so on.


In the upper right corner, you’ll see your active account information. The settings icon, to the right of the active account information, is how you access your settings. To the right of that, the bell icon will show you any new notifications.


If you select from the dropdown menu, you’ll see all of your accounts, and any views you have associated with them.


Now we’ll look at our Reporting navigation.


Here in the left navigation bar is where you will access your reports.


The “Dashboards” section will show you the most important reports at a glance.


The “Shortcuts” section will give you quick access to the reports you use the most often.


The “Intelligence Events” section monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations, and then alerts you when those variations occur.


The “Real Time” section shows you your website traffic in “real time”, or your current traffic.


Next, there are your four categories of reporting: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion.


If you select a report category, like “Audience”, it will expand to show you all of the reports available in that category.


Below is an outline of your interface after you’ve gone into a report --

in this case, the Location report in the Audience category:


You have your report header at the top (“Location”), which tells you which report you’re currently viewing.


Your report controls allow you to customize, email, export, add the report to your Dashboard, or add it to your Shortcuts.


To the right, your current date range is displayed. You can change the date range you want to view by clicking in and selecting a new range.


The graduation cap, located directly under the date range, will provide you with Analytics tutorials and assistance.


Under your report controls, you have the option to modify and add segments, which we will discuss later in this course.


Under the “All Users” header, you’ll see “Map Overlay” and “Explorer” tabs.


These tabs allow you to explore your data in different ways. In this case, you can either view the data in a map, or click “Explorer” to see it in a graph and table view:


Below the tab labels are the metric group links. In this example, we have “Summary”, “Site Usage”, and “Ecommerce”. We’ll talk more about these later.


Core ConceptsSessions, Date Ranges, Bounce Rate, Sources and Channels, Metrics and Dimensions

Core Concepts: Sessions

Simply put, a “Session” is a visit to your website. A session can include a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple pageviews, interactions, and e-commerce transactions.

Core Concepts: Sessions

Core Concepts: Date Ranges

You view your reports based on the date range that is selected.

You’ll find the date range in the upper right corner of your window:

You can select a specific date range to view by clicking the small dropdown arrow to the right of the dates, and selecting your start date and end date:


To compare two date ranges within a report, click on the date range in the upper right corner, clicking the “Compare to” option and selecting the two ranges you would like to compare:


Core Concepts: Bounce Rate

“Bounce Rate” is defined as the percentage of visitors to your website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may mean that people don’t find what they’re looking for when they reach your site, or that there is something wrong with your landing page.

Core Concepts: Sources and Channels

Every person that visits your website has an origin, or “source”, which Google keeps track of in various reports.

It’s important to understand where your traffic is coming from. Next, we’ll go over Sources, Mediums, and Channels.


Source: The specific origin of your traffic (for example, www.yahoo.com)

http://www.yahoo.com

http://www.yahoo.com


Medium: The general category of the source. For example, some mediums are organic search (organic), cost-per-click paid search (cpc), or a web referral.


Channel: A group of several traffic sources that are the same medium.

Channel definitions:

● Organic Search—Visitors who come to your website after searching Google.com and other search engines

● Paid Search—Visitors who come to your website from an AdWords or other paid search ad

● Direct—Visitors who come to your website without a traceable referral source, such as typing your URL into their address bar or using a bookmark on their browser

● Referral—Visitors who come to your website from another website by clicking on a link

● Social—Visitors who come to your website from a social network


Core Concepts: Metrics and Dimensions

Every report is made up of dimensions and metrics:

● Dimensions: Dimensions describe characteristics of your users, such as their sessions and actions.

● Metrics: Quantitative measurements.

The Metric Group Links take you to different data views within a report. In the example below, we are looking at the Acquisition All Traffic report.


Next, we’ll go through a couple of data tables with a different Metric Group Link selected.

Summary:


Site Usage:


Goal Set 1:


Types of Reports

Types of Reports

Once you’ve set up your account and successfully installed your tracking code, Google starts to collect your website data. Google then organizes this data into a collection of reports (listed in the menu on the left). Each report can be used differently to meet your business/website objectives.

Types of Reports

To get to your Reporting section, click on the “Reporting” tab (as shown below). Once you are in that section, “Reporting” should be highlighted at the top of the screen. The reporting section shows you all of your data as it relates to the account and the view that you’re in.

Types of Reports

Intelligence events monitor significant changes in your traffic and website usage.

Intelligence detects statistical variations, and alerts you

when those variations occur.

Types of Reports

Real-Time monitors activity on your site as it’s happening.

Types of Reports

Audience reports give you insights into your website

visitors, such as their location, their interests, and what

devices they’re using to get to your site.

Types of Reports

Acquisition reports tell you where your users are coming from, their conversion pattern, and about their behavior on

your site.

Types of Reports

Behavior reports show you how your users interact with

your website, everything from the content, to how they

navigate between all of the pages.

Types of Reports

Conversion reports tell you how all of your channels work together to drive your goals.

Types of Reports

By clicking into one of these categories, you will see all of the reports available within

that section:Here in the Audience section, you can view your Audience

reports, such as your Audience Overview,

Demographics, Interests, and so on.

Types of Reports

By clicking into a report, for instance “Demographics”, you can access even more specific reports within that

category, such as “Overview”, “Age”, and

“Gender”.

Questions?

Part Two: Reporting1. Using Reports

2. Audience Reports

3. Acquisition Reports

4. Behavior Reports

5. Conversions Reports

6. Creating a Custom Report

7. Emailing reports

Using ReportsSegmentation and Filters

Segmentation

Segmentation

Segmentation is the first step to any analysis.

Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your data. A segment is a series of individual filters in your data that create a well-defined slice of your data.

Segmentation

Filters help you transform the data so that it aligns with your business goals.

Most users want to filter themselves and their employees out of your data, as they do not want to analyze web traffic from within their organization. To do this, an administrator must clear any data from the ip addresses used by your organization.

Segmentation

Say that you only want to see your visitors from the United States. You would go to your “Geo” reports, and then click into “Location”. You will see a list of the different countries where your traffic is originating from:

Segmentation

Within this category, you can segment your data by narrowing it down to traffic in the United States by clicking “United States” from the list. This will break down the data by region:

Segmentation

Near the top of the page under the subheader “Location”, you’ll find options to click into a different report, or to view all traffic again:

Segmentation

This is the simplest form of segmentation. You are also able to combine segments, or “carry” a segment with you throughout the site in order to drill further into your data.

For example, let's say that you want to carry the segment of the United States around to different reports, in order to evaluate only your traffic from the United States.

Segmentation

First, click “Add Segment”, which is above your report underneath “All Users”:

Segmentation

Then, click the red “New Segment” button in the upper left corner:

Segmentation

You’ll find a list of the different categories from which you can select your segment. You can toggle between these

tabs, and this is where you'll be creating your filters.

Segmentation

Since you want to view traffic from the United States, you want to stay in this demographics section:

Segmentation

In the bottom of this section you’ll see a field for “Location”, and the two buttons to filter the data,

“Continent” and “Contains”:

Segmentation

Click “Continent”, and select “Country” from the dropdown menu, as you want to view the country of the United States. In the dropdown menu labeled “contains”, click and change this to “Exactly Matches”. Then, type “United States” in the blank field to the right:

Segmentation

You are telling Analytics that you want to segment your data by only including information if it contains the words

“United States” in the “Country” category of location.

Segmentation

This new segment will replace the “All Users” label. It will also tell you what percentage of your traffic this segment contains. You can now click into any report and you’ll be viewing only traffic from the United States.

Segmentation

You can edit or remove this segment at any time by clicking the dropdown arrow on the right side of the

segment:

Setting Up Filters

Setting Up Filters

Filters allow you to sort your data, or “slice” it so that you can get the specific information

you're looking for in any report.

Setting Up Filters

For example, we’ll look at the “Source/Medium” report in the “All Traffic” category:

Setting Up Filters

In this example, we’ll filter the data to only view web traffic with

“organic” as the medium. At the top of the tableview is a search box:

Setting Up Filters

In the search box, you want to type “organic” and hit enter. This will show you all of the data from organic traffic. You can see how the table changes:

Setting Up Filters

This is the most simple type of filter. You also have the ability to set up more complex, specific filters.

For example, let’s say you want to see all organic traffic, EXCEPT any organic traffic with

Yahoo as the source.

Setting Up Filters

First, exit out of your current filter by clicking the “x” in the search box. Then, choose “Advanced” to the right of the search box:

Setting Up Filters

Now, we’re going to build what’s known as “filter queries”. On the left, you have the option to “include” or “exclude” either a dimension or a metric. Of the available dimensions or metrics, Source/Medium is selected:

Setting Up Filters

In the dimension/metric dropdown menu, you can see your available dimensions in green. The metrics are listed in blue:

Setting Up Filters

If you want to view all of your referral traffic except for Yahoo, you’ll want to “Include” any “Source/Medium”

containing “Organic”.

Setting Up Filters

Then, you select the “Add a dimension or metric” option. Here, you want to choose “exclude” instead of “include”, and

type “Yahoo” in the blank field.

Setting Up Filters

With this filter, you will include everything containing organic and exclude anything containing Yahoo, allowing you to view

specific data and see how the data table changes.

Setting Up Filters

In this advanced filter view, there are thousands of ways to slice up your data to give you insights into your traffic. For example, you could view all of your organic traffic excluding AOL, but with a bounce rate over 40%. With a filter like this, you could see the bounce rates of traffic from specific sources, and compare. If you had a higher bounce rate from traffic originating from Google, for example, it may mean that your site is not properly optimized for that search engine.

Setting Up Filters

Another more advanced filtering technique is to include two source/mediums.

This is called an “Or” Filter, as you are including traffic that falls under one category OR another category.

Setting Up Filters

For example, let’s say you want to view only Yahoo and Google traffic. In the advanced filter section, you want to “include” any “Source/Medium”, then select the “Matching RegExp” option, which allows you to enter two sources to

include. Type out the sources, separated with a vertical bar:

Setting Up Filters

By applying this filter, you are telling Analytics to only include any source/medium matching “Yahoo” OR “Google”.

Audience ReportsOverview Report, Demographics and Interests, Location Report,

Behavior Report, Technology Report

Audience Reports

The “Audience” section of Google Analytics helps you to learn different characteristics about your audience, such as what devices they’re using, what percentage of your users are “new” or “returning”, and demographic information such as age and location.

Audience Overview Report


The Audience Overview Report is the “10,000 foot view” of your site traffic as it relates to the time period that you've selected.


At the top of your report, you have your data over time, in this case defaulted to Sessions. However, you can change this to any other metric simply by selecting from the drop-down menu in the

upper left.


Below that, you can see some at-a-glance report information:

Demographics Reports

Audience Reports: Demographics

The Demographics Overview report tells you about the age and gender of your viewers, broken down by your Key Metric (“Sessions” in this example) as well your selected date range:


By clicking into specific Demographics reports (“Age” and “Gender”), you can get a more in-depth view of these aspects of

your audience:

Location Reports


The Location report will give you a geographic representation of the world, with your traffic highlighted in different shades based

on the number of sessions (or any other metric you select).


It will also provide you with a data table. As we looked at earlier, you can click into a specific country to drill down further into your

geographical information.

Behavior Reports

Audience Reports: Behavior

The Behavior reports allows you to analyze user behavior on your website. There are three Behavior reports:

● New vs. Returning● Frequency & Recency● Engagement


New vs. Returning Report

The New vs. Returning report breaks down your data into new users, and returning users:


New vs. Returning Report

This is an important report, as those who are being introduced to your site for the first time are going to approach it very differently from those who have been there before.


Frequency and Recency Report

This report can provide insight into what's happening when visitors return to your site.



This gives us an idea of how many times users are coming back to the site using the Count of Sessions metric, which you can see in the left side column. Below, you can see that 3,401 people had 1 session, 486 people had 2 sessions, and so forth.



If you click “Days since last session”, you’ll find a report that tells you how long it’s been in between each session:


Engagement Report

The Engagement Report tells you about Session Duration (the length of time users are spending on your site), as well as Page Depth (how “deep” users are getting into your site before they leave).


Engagement Report

In the Session Duration section of your Engagement report, you’ll find information about how long the sessions on your site are lasting:


Engagement Report

In this example, you’ll notice that 3,003 of the sessions lasted only 0-10 seconds long, 333 sessions lasted 11-30 seconds, and so forth.


Engagement Report

You can click over to “Page Depth”, and you’ll find information about how “deep” people are getting into your site before they leave:


Engagement Report

In this example, you can see that 373 people only got 1 page deep, 2,541 people got 2 pages deep, and so forth.

Technology Reports

Technology Reports

The Technology reports are incredibly useful when it comes to making sure that your site is functioning well on all operating systems and browsers.

Technology Reports

Browser & OS Report

This report breaks down your data by the browser or the operating system used to access your site.

Technology Reports

Browser & OS Report

Comparing this data can give you key takeaways about your website functionality. For example, you may notice that one browser has a particularly high bounce rate:

Technology Reports

Browser & OS Report

In this example, the Bounce Rate in Firefox is 13.73%, while for Safari it’s only .84%. This may indicate that there is something off-putting about your site when opened in the Firefox browser.

Technology Reports

Browser & OS Report

To view Operating Systems instead, simply select another “primary dimension” from above the table:

Technology Reports

Mobile Reports

The Mobile reports will tell you what categories of devices are being used to access your site (“Overview”), as well as what kind of mobile devices are being used (“Devices”).

Technology Reports

Mobile Reports: Overview

Here in the Overview report, you can see a breakdown of what percentage of users are using mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet:

Technology Reports

Mobile Reports: Devices

The Devices Report tells you which mobile devices are most used to view your website.

Technology Reports

Mobile Report

If your website has a lot of mobile traffic, it’s very important that your site be mobile-friendly. If your

site is not mobile-friendly, Google is going to lower your search results rank based on new policies

passed last year.

Acquisition ReportsOverview report; Channels, Sources and Mediums; All Traffic Reports, Social Reports

Acquisition Reports

Your Acquisition Reports tell you how exactly users are finding your website. This section is where we look more closely at which channels (email, social media, organic searches, etc.) are bringing traffic to your site.

A such, your Acquisition Reports provide you valuable insight about which of your marketing efforts are working, and where they could be improved.

Channels, Sources, and Mediums

Review: Channels, Sources, and Mediums

● Source: The specific origin of your traffic (for example, www.yahoo.com)

● Channel: A group of several traffic sources that are the same medium.

● Medium: The general category of the source. For example, some mediums are organic search (organic), cost-per-click paid search (cpc), or a web referral, where someone has clicked on the link to your website that has been “referred” or shared with them (referral).

A channel is a group of several traffic sources that are the same medium.

For example, an organic google search and an organic yahoo search have different sources (Google and Yahoo), but they both fall under the medium of Organic search. As such, they would be grouped together in the “Organic Search” channel.

Review: Channels, Sources, and Mediums

Acquisition Overview Report


From the Acquisition Overview tab, you can see a quick view of:● The top channels sending visitors to your website● Their behavior on your site after they arrive● Any conversion patterns


From the Primary Dimension drop down menu above the report, you can choose to view your Top Channels, Top Sources/Mediums, Top Sources or Top Mediums:


This allows you to look more specifically at how people are getting to your site.

All Traffic Reports

All Traffic Reports

Under the Acquisition “Overview” report, you’ll see a tab that says “All Traffic”.

Here, you will find a collection of reports that delve deeper into your

acquisition data.

All Traffic Reports

Channels Report

This report gives you an in depth look at the channels bringing traffic to your site.

All Traffic Reports

Channels Report

In this example, you may notice

that the “Social” channel is not

driving a lot of traffic to this site.

In this scenario, you may want

to consider whether or not you

need to increase your social

media marketing efforts in

order to improve this.

All Traffic Reports

Channels Report

Not only can you evaluate which channels are driving the most traffic to your site, but you can evaluate how

traffic from different channels is performing.

All Traffic Reports

Channels ReportOne of the best ways to compare how different channels are performing is to click on the “Compare to Site Average” feature. To select this option, go to the fourth option in the buttons in the right hand corner:

All Traffic Reports

Channels Report

This option allows you to compare how different sources are performing overall compared to the site average.

All Traffic Reports

Channels ReportIn the example below, you can see that the number of sessions compared to site

average vary greatly. “Organic Search” is driving a much higher number of users

to the site.

All Traffic Reports

Channels Report

You can use the dropdown menu at the top of the right column to choose what elements you would like to compare:

All Traffic Reports

Channels ReportNow, let’s say that you want to know which page people are landing on (“Landing Page”) when they come from different channels. This will require bringing in a secondary dimension. To do this, select “Landing Page” from the “Secondary Dimension” drop down menu:

All Traffic Reports

Channels Report

The secondary dimension (“Landing Page”) will be added to the data chart to the right of the primary dimension (“Default Channel Grouping”):

All Traffic Reports

Source/Medium Report

Your Source/Medium reports will tell you about your traffic based on the source and medium. In the example below, you can see that Source/Medium is the primary dimension:

All Traffic Reports


In this example, you can see that “google/organic” is the topmost Source/Medium

driving visitors to this site. Meanwhile, “yahoo/organic” is the sixth Source/Medium,

with a small 1.10% of sessions.

All Traffic Reports


This may indicate that focusing your efforts to optimize your site for

Yahoo might be beneficial in increasing your sessions

overall.

Social Reports

Social Reports

Social media has become an influential part of many people’s day to day lives, and has a significant effect on

how information spreads online.

Social Reports

Social media affects your website analytics in the following ways:1. Links and shares that refer users to your website from

social media sites2. By adding social links to your website (or “social

plugins”) that make sharing easier3. People interacting with your content on social media

(unfortunately, this is difficult to track as most social networks do not share this data with Google Analytics)

Social Reports

Social Overview Report

The first part of this report is the “social value” of your website, displayed in a circle:

Social Reports


At the top of the circle is the total number of conversions that have happened on your site within the date range selected:

Social Reports


A “conversion” is when a visitor performs an action on your site that you care about, such as filling out a form, or showing a high level of engagement with your site through clicks or long sessions.

Social Reports


Once you have Goal Tracking set up, you’ll be able to select the conversion goal you want to view in the upper left corner of the Overview report:

Social Reports


In this example report, there have been 629 conversions.

Social Reports


There is a dollar amount displayed by this number because a value was assigned to this conversion goal when it was set up. Google then displays the dollar value for those conversions.

Social Reports


The Contributed Social Conversions lists the number of goal conversions in which a social site contributed to that goal conversion at some point.

Social Reports


The Last Interaction Social Conversions tells you the number of conversions in which the social site was the last interaction the user had before completing a goal action/conversion on your website:

Behavior ReportsBehavior Overview Report, Behavior Flow, Site Content Reports,

Site Speed Reports

Behavior Reports

The Behavior sections of Google Analytics tells you

about how users are interacting with your website. Using this section, you can

find out which content on your site is the most popular, and

exactly how users are navigating your site.

Behavior Overview Report


The Behavior Overview Report provides you with a brief overview of all of the behavior metrics, such as page views and bounce rate:


We’ll review each of these metrics below:

● Pageviews: How often each page on your site was visited. One visitor can have multiple page views.

● Unique Pageviews: The number of individual people who have visited a specific page at least once. If a visitor loads the same page multiple times, it will only count for one unique pageview.

● Avg Time on Page: The average amount of a time a user spends on a page.

● Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

● Exit Rate: % Exit, or Exit Rate, is the percentage of pageviews that were the last in the session.


You’ll also find a list of your pageviews, and the percentage of those pageviews in relation to the rest of the pageviews on the site:


You can also view this list by “Page Title”, instead of the page url, by clicking on “Page Title” to the left of this list:

Behavior Flow

Behavior Flow Report

The Behavior Flow report shows you the path that visitors are travelling through your site.


This spans the first page that visitors view, through the last page they view before they leave your site.


You can change your view type underneath the report header, if you’d like to view Events, create your own groupings, and so forth:


The red sections indicate users dropping off, or leaving your site, at this point in the Behavior Flow:


You can also click into any of these points in the Behavior Flow for more information about the traffic moving through that page, by selecting “Explore traffic through here”:


By exploring each page specifically, you can evaluate how effective of a landing page it is by whether or not users are moving from that point to other pages.

Site Content Reports


There are four reports in the Site Content Reports section:

● All Pages: Provides detailed user interaction information about all pages on your website

● Content Drilldown: Provides user behavior information broken down by the subdirectories on your website

● Landing Pages: Tells you about the pages on which users enter your site

● Exit Pages: Tells you about the pages on which users leave your site

The All Pages report tells you your pageviews, average time on the site, and so on:


All Pages Report

The Page Values section on the far right tells you transaction value + total goal value divided by unique pageviews to tell you your “page values”:


All Pages Report

The Content Drilldown report helps you to group pages that you may want to evaluate together, such as individual blog

posts within the blog section of your website.

This helps you determine which sections of your site are overall most popular.


Content Drilldown Report

In this report, you’ll find a list of the subdirectories your site is using:



This is the same content in your “All Pages” report, but grouped into your subdirectories.



If you click into one of these subdirectory categories, you’ll find more specific

information about the pages within that subdirectory. In the example below, we’ve

clicked into the “/about/” subdirectory:



These are the pages that are listed in the “About” subdirectory on our website (Internship Opportunities, Careers, Staff being the most popular):



This report is especially helpful in understanding how your pages are performing based on the Bounce Rate for each of these Landing Pages.


Landing Pages Report

High bounce rates indicate that this page is failing as a Landing Page, because the visitor is leaving your website immediately after landing on this page.


Landing Pages Report

In your Exit Pages report, can see which pages were the last that the visitors viewed before exiting:


Exit Pages Report

Noticing which pages users are leaving from can help you determine which pages may need to be improved.


Exit Pages Report

However, Exit Rate is not always a bad thing: for example, if you have a “Contact” page with a high Exit Rate, that is probably okay, as users have completed an action that will lead to more interactions with you or your website in the future.


Exit Pages Report

Site Speed Reports

Site Speed Reports

There are four reports in the Site Speed Reports section:

● Site Speed Overview: Provides information about how quickly users are able to see and interact with content

● Page Timings Report: Site speed data broken down by page

● Speed Suggestions Report: Provides you with ideas on how to improve your site speed

● User Timings Report: Allows you to measure how fast specific elements on a page load.To use this feature, you need to add custom code to your website.

The Site Speed reports measure the Load Time for Pages, or how quickly your users are able to view and interact with your content. To calculate this, Google Analytics uses a sample of the overall data.

Site Speed Reports

Site Speed Overview Report

Below, you can see the Average Page Load Time, Redirection Time, and so on:

Site Speed Reports


You can select which Site Speed metric to review graphically under the report header by selecting from the dropdown menu:

Site Speed Reports


Scrolling down, you’ll get an overview of the average load times based on the browser being used:

Site Speed Reports


You can also view your site speed by country or page, by selecting that option in the menu to the left of this list:

Site Speed Reports


In the Page Timings report, you can view this information broken down by individual pages:

Site Speed Reports

Page Timings Report

This will tell you, for each page, the number of pageviews and the Average Page Load Time compared to the rest of the site.

Site Speed Reports

Page Timings Report

You can switch to viewing this information in the data view by selecting “Data” in the upper right corner of the report:

Site Speed Reports

Page Timings Report

This will give you the ability to sort the information by metrics like Page Load Time, or you can add a second dimension:

Site Speed Reports

Page Timings Report

The Speed Suggestions report provides you with immediate ideas on how to improve your site speed, based on an

analysis that Google Analytics runs for you.

Site Speed Reports

Speed Suggestions Report

In this report, you’ll find a list of your pages, their views and load times, as well as a link to Google’s suggestions on how to improve the site load time:

Site Speed Reports


By clicking on the PageSpeed Suggestions links, you’ll get a pop-up window outlining Google’s suggestions on ways to improve the speed of that particular page:

Site Speed Reports


Conversion ReportsSetting Up Goals, Goals Reports

The Conversion Reports section gives you information about important actions that users take on your website. In this course, we focus on setting up and tracking conversion goals.

If you are interested in Ecommerce specifically, check out the Further Resources listed at the end of this presentation.

Conversion Reports

Setting Up Goals

What are “Goals” in Google Analytics?

Put simply, goals measure how well your site is meeting various objectives. A goal can be defined however you want. Most often, goals are a completed activity (called a “conversion”) that contributes to your website or business goals. Examples of goal conversions would be filling out a Contact Form, signing up for an account, downloading a PDF, and so forth.

Next, we’ll go over how to set up a Goal.

Conversion Reports: Goals

First, go to the top of the Analytics page, and choose “Admin”:


Then, choose “Goals” from the “View” column:


Choose “New Goal”:


Enter in a name for your Goal, and choose your “Goal Type”.



Goal Types:

● Destination: For this option, you give Google a URL that, when hit by the user, translates to a successful conversion (for example, an “Order Confirmation” page)

● Duration: Used for tracking time spent on your site● Pages per session: Used for tracking pages per session on

your site● Event: In order to use this type of goal, you need to have an

Event set up. Then, you can trigger a goal when this event occurs.


Next, enter in the Goal Details, based on what action you would like to track. In the example below, we are creating a Destination goal:


You can add optional info, such as the Value (to keep track of the monetary value of the goal conversion), or the Funnel (to analyze the behavior flow on your site as it relates to this goal).

Goals Reports

Goals Reports

Your Goals Reports give you information about goal completions, the values of the goal completions, the goal conversion rate, abandonment rate (if you have set funnels up), and the total completions of each goal.

The goal conversion rate is a helpful in seeing what percentage of sessions on the site are “successful”, based on your objectives.

Goals Reports

Goals Overview Report

This report gives you an overview of your goal completion data:

Goals Reports


You can select whether you want to view all of your goals, or choose a specific goal, in the upper left corner:

Goals Reports


At the bottom of the report, you can also view where on your website the goals are being completed, as well as the Source/Medium of the traffic that completed a goal:

Goals Reports

Goals URLs Report

In this report, you can find your goal completion data broken down by the URL where the goal was completed:

Goals Reports

Reverse Goal Path Report

Similar to a Funnel, this shows you how a user got to a particular goal:

Goals Reports


The Goal Completion Location, or where the goal was converted, is on the far left. The steps that were taken to lead to the goal completion or listed on the columns to the right.

Goals Reports


This report allows you to see if there are any issues with users travelling through your site to complete a goal -- or if there are any goal conversion paths that you might not have considered.

Goals Reports

Goal Flow Report

This report is similar to other Flow reports. In the example below, you can see which Sources are driving the selected Goal:

Goals Reports

Goal Flow Report

In this example, Google is driving the majority of traffic leading to this goal conversion.

Goals Reports

Goal Flow Report

You can also select a different Dimension from the dropdown menu:

Goals Reports

Setting up and tracking your Goal conversions is a great way to measure your site’s performance as it translates to direct results for your website or organization!

Creating a Custom Report

Custom Reports

Using custom reports, you can create any combination of dimensions and metrics that you want.

Custom Reports

To do so, first click the “Customization” option from the top menu. Then, click “New Custom Report”:

Custom Reports

First, name your report and your report tab. You can have multiple tabs in a

custom report. You can also choose your report type from Explorer, Flat Table or Map Overlay. Then, you can add a metric

and a dimension.

Custom Reports

Dimensions describe characteristics of your users, such as their sessions and

actions. Metrics are quantitative measurements.

Custom Reports

For this example, we’re going to look at average page load time for our exit pages:

Custom Reports

With this metric and dimension selected, we run the following report:

Custom Reports

Note: Creating custom reports can be tricky!

Not all dimensions and metrics can be compared in the same scope. For example, you can’t create a report that mixes the Conversion Rate for a specific page with the Page Depth for the entire website, as the conversion rate for a specific page doesn’t relate to the measurement of the the page depth of the site overall.

Emailing Reports

Emailing Reports

At the top of most of your reports, under the report header to the left side, you’ll see an option that says “Email”:

Emailing Reports

If you click “Email”, this options window will pop up. First, enter the recipient of the email in the “to” field.

Emailing Reports

Then, you get to select what file format you would like the report to be sent in:

A PDF is a good option for someone who won’t want to interact with or format the data themselves in any way. A CSV or an Excel file is best for someone who wants to interact with the data in spreadsheet format.

Emailing Reports

Then, you can select your frequency:

You can choose a frequency, or just chose to have the report sent once. You can also choose for how long you would like it to be sent at this frequency. Then, click “send”!

Questions?

Further Resources

Google Analytics Help Center: https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906

Google Analytics Developers: https://developers.google.com/analytics/help/

Google Analytics Academy: https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/

https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906

https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906

https://developers.google.com/analytics/help/

https://developers.google.com/analytics/help/

https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/

https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/

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