Connect with current and find new customers on Facebook,using tactics that create more business using social media.
Increase your web traffic and online sales with Google advertising.
Create a professional website that increases your reach, keeps customers engaged and grows your business.
Collect and manage business reviews from 100s of sites like Google, Facebook and Yelp.
In this weeks Google Analytics DIY series, we will be looking at how to set up different views to separate and distinguish the data that will help you to better understand the visitors that are coming to your website. To get started, I recommend that you use 3 different views for basic analytic analyzation: All Website Data, Master View, and Test View.
The All Website Data view displays all data that lands on your website including visitors, spam, bots, and all other junk traffic. This view will remain untouched.
The Master View will be the most accurate view you will use in analyzing your analytics. We will be adding filters to eliminate the ‘junk’ traffic and this view will be a more accurate representation of your traffic. Filters will be discussed in the upcoming tutorial.
The Test View is exactly that, a view that you can use to test different filters, metrics, and segments so you can learn what works best for you with out contaminating the analytics in your Master View.
Let’s get started.
After logging in to your Google Analytics account, click on Admin in the bottom left hand corner taking you to the admin panel.
In the right hand column labeled View, select Create View.
From here, you will need to select Website or Mobile App for the data this view should track. Both types of views can display any data you send to your property, regardless of how you collect those hits. For example, you can see web data in your app views and app data in your web views.
However, if you’re only collecting and sending one type of data to Google, we recommend using views that will give you the best analysis experience. If you only collect data from mobile apps, select app when you create a view and if you only collect data from websites, select web.
Name this View. In following the guidelines of this tutorial, you can name it Master View. However, you can choose whatever name you would like. We just suggest to make it descriptive so you can easily tell what data you are looking at.
From the drop down box select the Reporting Time Zone and choose your country and time zone.
If your Analytics account is linked to a Google Ads account, the time zone is automatically set to your Google Ads preference, and you won’t see this option.
Hit create view, and you are all set up to add filters and start developing your strategy to track your users.
Notes:
In our next Google Analytics DIY tutorial, we will be adding filters to screen out spam, bots, and all other junk from your data.
“Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.”
–Tim Westergen, Pandora Founder
The Google Analytics DIY series continues! We will be providing an overview of the Behavior Report in its default settings in your GA dashboard.
The Behavior Report Overview
Let’s get started.
To access the Behavior Report select Behavior on the left side of the screen, then select Overview.
Navigate to the right side of the screen to select a time period you want to view. This provides you with the option to input the Date Range in variables of Custom, Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, Last 7 Days, or Last 30 Days. You can set up comparisons for different time periods. You can view the difference of site traffic for August of last year with August of the current year. After selecting your time period, select apply.
Please note, tracking data will only track back to the date you placed the analytics code on your website; there is no information prior to the set up of your GA account.
The first chart in view is the Info-Graph chart. In the drop-down box in the upper left hand corner, you can select Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, Avg Time on Page, Bounce Rate, or % Exit.
At the right side of the graph you can easily select the detailed time view to analyze by Hour, Day, Week, or Month. This chart provides a visual overview of peak days and times that users are viewing your website. This information proves invaluable in getting to know your users, and the best practices to market to them.
The second half of the Behavior Report Overview page provides a detailed description of each metric with Site Content divided into four categories: Page, Page Title, Search Term, and Event Category. In the chart shown, the Site Content is Page, with the Page column displaying the URL of the top 10 Pageviews for the time period chosen. To see a full report of all the website pages viewed in this time period, click View Full Report in the lower right hand corner.
Using the same chart, but changing the metric to Page Title, the Page viewed information is now listed by Page Title. This is often easier to understand than reading the URL.
Term and Event Category tracking are custom metrics which need to be created before you will receive any data on them. This will be covered this in an upcoming BST tutorial. Visit GoogleAnalytics – Site Search Term or
In upcoming tutorials, we will be expanding the explanation of the Behavior category reports by illustrating Behavior Flows (one of my favorite reports), Site Content, Speed, and Search, as well as Events which reveal the actions taken by users on your website.
“If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.”
– Brian Tracy, CEO Brian Tracy International
In this Google Analytics DIY tutorial, we are interpreting the Acquisition Report. This highlights how your site acquired visitors. You can see the top channels driving visitors to your website (i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, email, and others), track Google Ads and Social Media advertising campaigns, as well as see the number of visitors who visit each (landing) page on your website.
Similar to the previous analysis of the Audience Report, we will explain the default settings of the Acquisition Overview. There are far too many variables on the report to discuss in one post. Our goal is to provide you with a basic understanding, providing you with necessary information to decipher the stats provided.
Let’s get started.
Login to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Views. In this tutorial we will be focusing on the basic All Website Data to walk you through the platform. We will later discuss creating your own custom view.
If you need help setting up your Google Analytics account see our Getting Started post that details the setup.
To view the Acquisition Report select Acquisition on the left side of the screen, then select Overview.
Navigate to the right side of the screen to select a time period you want to view. This provides you with the option to input the Date Range in variables of Custom, Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, Last 7 Days, or Last 30 Days. You can set up comparisons for different time periods. You can view the difference of site traffic for August of last year with August of the current year. After selecting your time period, select apply.
Please note, tracking data will only track back to the date you placed the analytics code on your website; there is no information prior to the set up of your GA account.
The Top Channels overview is the first overview after applying the date range for your analysis. A pie chart visual represents the source(s) directing visitors to your website, while the Users graph displays the number of visitors on your site in the selected date range.
Below these charts are the acquisition sources and the data associated with each. Each is defined below:
Organic Search: Visitors who found your website though a search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Paid Search: Visitors who by clicked an ad you are promoting on one of the search engines.
Direct: Visitors who directly entered your domain name into their address bar, therefore coming directly to your website with no alternate source.
Referral: Visitor who clicked on a link from another website which led to your site. For example, a vendor or a professional organization may have your site listed.
Social: Visitor who came to your site via social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
In order to view Conversion statistics, you will need to set up Goals within the analytics platform. We will cover this in another tutorial.
The bottom portion of the Acquisition Overview Report provides more detail about your site visitors by carving each into separate categories including Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.
Acquisitions includes total users, new users and number sessions withing the date/time range you selected.
Behavior statistics show the sites Bounce Rate, Pages Per Session, and Avg Session Duration.
Conversion data will not appear until specific Goals have been defined in the GA platform.
To explore further detail in the Acquisition report go the the left panel and choose the options below. These provide a more indepth understanding of your site users.
All Traffic: Channels, Treemaps, Source/ Medium, Referral
Google Ads: Campaigns, Treemaps, Keywords, Search Queries, Hours Of Day, and Final URL
Search Console: Landing Pages, Countries, Devices, Queries
Social: Overview, Network Referrals, Landing Pages, Conversions, Plugins, Users Flow
Campaigns: All Campaigns, Paid Keywords, Organic Keywords, Cost Analysis
Google Analytics should be a part of your daily practice. The best way to understand GA and all the reports is to constantly monitor and read them. Not only will this help you become more skilled in the platform, it will also provide valuable insight into your site and its users.
Like all things in life, the more practice, the better you will get.
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently… A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
-Henry Ford, founder Ford Motor Company
Over the next few weeks in our Google Analytics DIY series posts, we will be discussing Reports, beginning with the Audience Report. There are far too many variations of reports in GA to cover all the possibilities, so we will be looking at the basics of each report. Any change to the report, even simply changing a Dimension & Metric or adding a Segment you will alter or increase the information that you receive. Therefore, we are going to focus on the reports as they appear in default with no changes or additions.
Login to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Views. In this tutorial we will be focusing on the basic All Website Data to walk you through the platform. We will later discuss creating your own custom view.
To view the Audience Report select Audience on the left side of the screen, then select Overview.
Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
Here you can select the time frame you want to look at.
On the right side of the screen you see a drop down box to input a time period you want to track. Selecting this gives you the option to input the Date Range in terms of Custom, Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, Last 7 Days, or Last 30 Days. You can set up comparisons for different time periods. For instance, you can view your sites traffic difference for August of last year with August of this year. After setting your time period, select apply.
Please note, tracking information can only go back to the time you placed the code on your website; there is no information available before you set up your GA account.
The Overview chart is based on the time frame you selected. The chart will show how many visitors came to your site and when these Users visited.
This can be broken down into Hourly, Day, Week, or Month. If you scroll your mouse over the timeline it will show how many Users came at each reference point.
Users – Users is the total number of visitors to your website for the time period chosen.
New User – New User is the total number of 1st time visitors to your website in the time period chosen.
Session – The period of time a user is active on your website. By default, if a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more, any future activity is attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session.
Number Of Sessions Per User – The average number of sessions each User has in the chosen time period.
Page Views –Number of totals pages on your website that were viewed by all the Users that visited during your chosen time period.
Pages/Session – Average number of pages that visitors to your website looked at per session.
Avg Session Duration – This tells you how long on average, visitors are staying on your website. Using the graphic above, we see that on average, every visitor that comes to this website, looks at 4-5 of the pages, with an average time of being on the website of almost 3 minutes.
Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that view one page and then leave your website. For example, if 100 people visited your website in the chosen time period, and 45 of those visitors only looked at one page, then left your website, your Bounce Rate would be 45%. Keep in mind there is no definitive number that qualifies as a good or bad Bounce Rate. For instance, if a visitor lands on your Home page, you want them to continue deeper into your website, so a high Bounce Rate for that page would be bad. However, if a visitor lands on a Contact or Form page, you want them to provide the necessary information at the end of their journey and move on, so a high Bounce Rate on these pages would be considered good.
On the right there is a Pie Chart showing the difference between New and Returning visitors in percentages.
Demographics
System
Mobile
Hopefully we have provided you with a basic understanding of the Audience Report. We are always here to help if you have questions, contact us directly and we’d be happy to offer more insight.
Tune in next week as we will be breaking down the Acquisition Report.
“The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”
Nolan Bushnell, founder Atari andChuck-E-Cheese
