A Beginner’s
Guide to Google
Analytics
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Getting Started
Introduction
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides statistics for your blog
or website. This guide looks at some of the basics to help you get
started with this handy tool.
Get the code
You’ll need to create a Google Analytics account, and set up your tracking
code.
Refer to the “Get started with Analytics” guide – follow the
instructions in step 1 and step 3. Make sure you follow through
these steps within Google Analytics and copy the code that you
are given – don’t copy the code displayed in the guide. You’re
looking for the web tracking code rather than the mobile tracking
code.
You may find that you cannot insert the Analytics code on your
site, particularly if you have a hosted website,
e.g.yourname.blogprovider.com. In this case it’s best to double-
check with your website provider if it’s possible to use Google
Analytics with them.
If you have been able to install the code on your site then it can
take up to 24 hours before you have any statistics to look at. In
that case, I’d suggest that you return to this eBook in a day or two.
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Orientation
Access Google Analytics here: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/
Tip: Bookmark this link so you can find it in future. Ideally, create
a folder in your Bookmarks called “Website Admin” and store a
link to Analytics there.
Even before you click through to the main interface of Google
Analytics, you can view an overview of your statistics. This is
extremely useful if you have multiple sites. Click the “Show
Metrics” button, top left.
Click on the name of your site to start looking at your stats.
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Jargon Buster
Before we get into the screens, let’s go over a few of the technical terms used
within Analytics.
Term What it means
A visit occurs when someone finds your site. Each time
someone comes to your site, it counts as 1 visit. The
Visits
same person can generate many visits if they come to
your site many times.
The number of different people who visited your site
Unique visitors
within a given time period.
Whenever someone views a page on your site, such as
the home page or one blog post, it counts as one page
Pageviews
view. If the person then looks at another page, that will
count as an additional page view.
This shows how many pages people are looking at when
they visit. Example: If a site has 5,000 visits and 10,000
Pages / Visit pageviews, that’s an average of 2 pages per visit. 5,000
visits and 5,000 pageviews would give an average of 1
page per visit.
Avg. Visit The average time that each visit lasted on your site, in
Duration minutes and seconds.
The percentage of people who visited your site and
immediately moved on without looking at any other
pages. A bounce rate of 100% would mean that
Bounce Rate
everyone who found your site left without clicking
anywhere else on your site. The lower the bounce rate,
the better.
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% New Visits How many visits came from people who found your site
for the first time.
Understanding the Graph
The graph is displayed on all of the main screens within Google
Analytics, so it’s worth getting acquainted with it. By default, the
graph shows “All Visits”. Each circle on the graph represents a
day. Hover over a circle to see more information.
In the top--right corner of the graph you’ll see a date range. Click
the arrow on the right--hand side to expand the options. To change
the date range, you can click on the calendar, or type in the date
range boxes.
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When you’ve selected the date range you wish to use, click on the
Apply button and the graph will be updated. Or click on the Cancel
link to go back to where you were before.
Changing the date range is a really good way to analyse your
statistics over many months. Also, if you move to other screens in
Analytics, the date range will be remembered.
Let’s customise the graph to show something other than Visits. At
the top you’ll see the following icon:
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Click the arrow on the left to change the metric.
First, click on the “All Visits” box to deselect it. Now click on “New
Users”, followed by “Returning Users”. Then click Apply.
Here’s the result. Notice how the circles at the top have changed
to show a percentage of each metric within the graph. And you
now have two lines on the graph, instead of just one.
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You can also see New vs Returning by using the left navigation
links and going to Audience – Behaviour – New vs. Returning.
There’s a lesson to be learned here in comparing new and
returning users. From the graph, I can see that my blog is mostly
attracting new users – so it’s not doing a very good job of getting
people to come back. That’s a different discussion entirely – but
it’s important to be able to extract this kind of insight from Google
Analytics.
Removing metrics
To remove one of the metrics, click the “x” next to it. Or go into
the menu again, and choose different metrics to compare.
If you want to get back to All Visits quickly, click “x” next to any
other metrics and All Visits will reappear when the last metric is
removed. Handy!
Try comparing some other metrics, and see what else you can learn about
your blog.
Working with the current day
Google Analytics shows the last 30 days of stats. However, it
usually excludes today. You can easily include today by changing
the date rate.
However, if you have a date range ending on the current day, it
may look like you have a lot less activity than normal. Just
remember that unless you’re looking at your stats at 11:59pm,
today isn’t over yet. Furthermore, Analytics may not record your
stats instantly (although it does a pretty good job).
So be careful when working with the current day.
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Learn About Your Audience
In the navigation menu on the left, you’ll find several links that will
help you find about more about the people visiting your site. To
get started, click on Audience – Technology – Browser and OS.
The first table shows the number of visits with different browsers.
As you can see, Chrome is top of the list for my blog, followed by
Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Larger sites may find this
very useful – for instance if you have a very large number of
people using Safari, you’ll want to make sure you test any changes
to your site in Safari if you don’t already do so.
You can learn more about the different versions of each browser
by clicking on the browser name. For the next screenshot, I clicked
Internet Explorer.
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If you’ve ever wondered “can I drop support for IE version 7 or 8?” – here’s the very table
that will show you. In web development circles, people may have all but given up on the
oldest versions of IE. However, it’s very important to understand how many users are on
an old browser version before you decide to stop supporting it. A tiny blog with 1000
visitors per month and only 5 visits in IE7 might be a no-brainer – but a huge website with
millions of people still using IE7 will be more difficult.
Navigating back to the start
It’s at this point that Analytics makes life a bit difficult for us. How on
earth do you get back to the previous screen? Well, you need to
scroll back to the top – above the graph – and click the tiny “ALL”
link.
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Alternatively, to view another browser, use the little dropdown to
the right of Internet Explorer. You could also click on one of the
version numbers shown in the table to drill--down into your
audience a little further. (Two screenshots below, side by side – in
case you wondered!)
This shows that 25% of all visits were using Firefox, while only 0.65% of visits
were using Firefox 24.
Operating System and more
Now, let’s go back to the original table. Across the top there are
some links – you can see more than just the browser. You can look
at the Operating System, Screen Resolution, Screen Colours, Flash
Version, and “Other” (which is just Java Support for now). I found
Screen Resolution to be quite interesting. How big a screen do
your users have?
If you thought the Operating System was interesting but wanted to
see more than just iOS or Android, use the left navigation to
browse to Audience – Mobile. There’s an overview that shows %
split between desktop, mobile and tablet. You can also click
Devices to view much more specific information about what
people use to browse your site.
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Customising the table view
Why not see your desktop/mobile/tablet split in a pie chart?
Simply go to Audience – Mobile – Overview and click the little pie
chart button. It’s the second icon along, next to Advanced.
Et voila!
This would be a good opportunity for you to have a closer look at
some of the screens we just went through. Try these:
1. Show Screen Resolution as a pie chart.
2. Show Browser as a pie chart.
3. On the Browser pie chart, use the “contribution to
total” dropdown and choose “Pageviews”.
If you’re ready to move on, let’s go!
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Traffic Sources
Traffic Sources show you how people are finding your site. There are four
traffic sources:
Source What it is
Search Traffic If someone searches for a particular type of content,
your site comes up in the results and they click the
link to your site, it will be listed here.
Referral If another website links to a page on your site and
Traffic someone clicks the link, that site will be listed as a
referring site.
Direct Traffic This refers to the people who typed the address of
your site manually, or clicked a link in their browser
favourites.
Campaigns Traffic from custom campaigns. This used to be called
“Other” – it is now more descriptive.
To view traffic sources, click on Traffic Sources – Sources – All
Traffic in the left navigation. Don’t bother with the Traffic Sources
overview – it’s not very useful.
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This shows all of your traffic sources. If you just want to show
sources of a certain type, go back to the left navigation links. For
instance, try the Referrals link.
You can reorder the list by clicking the column headers. For
instance, you can click on “Avg Visit Duration” to display the sites
that generated visits where people stayed the longest. You can
also display the sites that generated the highest bounce rate. To
sort in reverse order (lowest to highest), click on the column
heading twice (wait for it to load between the clicks – don’t double-
click it).
If you go to Referrals, look for the “Landing Page” link above the
table, next to Primary Dimension. This will show you which pages
had the most traffic from referrals.
Keywords
You can see search keywords by going to Traffic Sources – Sources – Search –
Organic.
Keywords are individual words or phrases that you type into a
search engine to find the sites you want to visit. In Google
Analytics, the Keywords page shows you which words or
phrases brought people to your site.
If you don’t see the words or phrases you think people should be
searching for to find your site, you may have to do a bit of search
engine optimisation.
The thing to remember is that there will always be other sites for
people to visit, and even the “best- optimised” sites cannot guarantee
success by optimisation alone.
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Start by writing great content. Optimisation is worth looking into,
but there’s not much point spending time on it if you aren’t
writing content that people would want to read. It’s a case of
getting your priorities straight.
Content
Click on Content – Site Content – All Pages to see the most viewed
content on your site within the last 30 days, or whichever time
period you choose.
Try sorting the table by Bounce Rate (click on the column header).
You can now choose the “Weighted” option under Sort Type for a
more useful result set.
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So instead of the 100% bounce rates with only 1 entrance at the
top of the list, you should now see the pages with the biggest
overall number of people bouncing away.
Comparing Date Ranges
If you want to compare traffic for two different periods of time, here’s how
you do it.
Go to Content – Overview and open up the date range in the top
right corner. We’re going to compare the stats for June 2013 and
July 2013.
Choose the date range as normal, starting with the later date
range. Instead of clicking Apply, click Compare to Past.
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This used to require you to choose both date ranges manually,
but now it auto-selects the same number of days immediately
before the start of the range you select. Cool! If all looks good,
click Apply to see the results.
The legend above the graph shows which line corresponds to each
date range. Beneath the graph, some figures will show you how
the site has changed in these time periods.
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Although the stats aren’t wildly different, you can see pageviews are up, but
time on page is down.
You can click on one of the icons under the graph to view more
about that stat. For instance, here’s a bounce rate comparison.
And if you want to get clever, why not change the metric from All
Visits to Referral Traffic? This shows you the bounce rate just for
referral traffic, just for the date ranges you chose to compare.
Although this may not be the best example as the graph is quite
similar to the one before, this shows how you can combine various
different metrics to build new graphs.
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Making a fair comparison
It’s usually easier to analyse your stats if you think week to week
and month to month. To compare statistics, you have to think
about what you’re comparing. Otherwise, it’s like comparing two
weeks' worth of comments when you wrote 3 posts one week and
7 posts the next. It’s not a fair comparison. Level the playing field,
and the comparison makes sense.
Visitors Flow
Under the Audience link on the left-hand side, the Visitors Flow
screen gives an interesting look at how people find your site, the
path they take from that page onwards, and how many drop off
along the way. Here’s an example.
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Hovering over each of the boxes shows you how many people are
dropping off. This is a big opportunity for optimisation.
For instance, on my blog, a lot of people start on the page where you can
download this very eBook
– but most drop off after getting the eBook. However, this isn’t
truly representative – Analytics won’t show people who come
back to the blog later, having read the eBook.
A better page to look at would be “/”, which is the homepage.
You can try to reduce the drop--off rate by showcasing your best
content on your homepage, cleaning up a cluttered layout,
showing content excerpts, or linking to your archives at the
bottom of the newest post list. It really depends on your site.
Next to “Country/Territory” there’s a dropdown where you can
choose a different metric. One you might find useful is the Social
metric. Browse to Social – Social Network to find this.
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To filter by social network, click on the network you wish to filter
by, and select “View only this segment”.
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To go back, click the Visitors Flow link at the top.
You can also click on the lines connecting each box together to highlight a
path.
Annotations
Annotations are very simple, but can really help if you want to
understand more about why your traffic changed on a given day.
The idea is that whenever you make a notable change to your site,
you should add an annotation. They are less useful if you use them
for anything and everything. Reserve annotations for when they
really matter.
To create an annotation, look for the little arrow underneath each
graph. Click on this, then click “Create new annotation”.
Type a description into the box, and click Save.
You can also try clicking on one of the circles on the graph. Click it
twice to highlight it, then click it again to create an annotation.
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Once added, you’ll be able to see annotations by looking at the little
icon on the line that runs across the bottom of the graph.
Goals
Goals are used to track conversions in Google Analytics. To get
started, click the Admin link in the top-right corner. Make sure
you’re working with the correct site, and click the Goals link I’ve
so crudely highlighted in the screenshot below.
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On the next page, click “Create a Goal”. There are a few different
types of goal; let’s stick with a simple one for now. Give your goal
a name of “Goal Test”, click “Destination”, and click Next Step.
Find a page on your blog that you’d like to track. I’m going to try
the Google Analytics eBook page. Note that you need to exclude
your domain name from the link – so the link I would use is below:
/bonus--content/free--ebook--a--beginners--guide--to--google--analytics/
This goes into the Destination field. You can also click the Verify
link to see what the conversion rate would be, based on your
current site data. If you’re using an existing page for a goal (rather
than a brand new page) this is a good way to check you’ve done
everything correctly.
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Now click “Create Goal” to set up the goal.
You can now track your goal in the “Conversions” link within the
main Google Analytics interface. Click “Reporting” at the top to get
out of the Admin section.
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How to set Analytics Account ?
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Question: – What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free service provider and an essential tool for search engine optimization
that is use for marketing purpose and helps you to measure the effectiveness of all your
marketing efforts.
Question: – How to set Google Analytics account for a
website?
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Setup a Google Analytics account for a website is very simple and easy. Follow the step by
step process listed below:
Step 1: Type this URL (http://www.google.com/analytics/) in your browser.
Step 2: Click on Sign in
Step 3: Sign in with your existed Google account
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Step 4: Click on Admin Tab
Step 5: Fill the information and then click on the Get Tracking ID
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Step 6: A pop-up window will open click on I Accept
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Step 7: Copy the JavaScript Code.
Step 8: Paste it on your website home page in <head> </head> section
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Step 9: Click on Home Tab
Step 10: Your website is listed now
Now enjoy and track your website performance.
Question: – Define Session, Users and Pageviews.
Answer: – Session: – In Google Analytics, a session is a group of interactions that take place
on your website within a given date range. For example a single session can contain page
views, social interactions, events, and ecommerce transactions.
Users: – In Google Analytics the users are, that have had at least one session within selected
date range. Repeted and new both are counted.
Pageviews: – In Google Analytics the pageviews is the total number of pages viewed.
Including the repeated views of a single page.
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What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a cloud-based analytics tool that measures and reports website traffic. It is
the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.
Why should we all use it?
Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your
audience and their needs. It gives actionable insights into how visitors find and use your site,
and how to keep them coming back. In a nutshell, Google Analytics provides information
about:
• What kind of traffic does your website generate – number of sessions, users and new
users
• How your users interact with your website & how engaged they are – pages per
session, average time spent on the website, bounce rate, how many people click on a
specific link, watch a video, time spent on the webpage
• What are the most and least interesting pages – landing and exit pages, most and least
visited pages
• Who visits your website – user`s geo location (i.e. city, state, country), the language
they speak, the browser they are using, the screen resolution of their device
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• What users do once they are on your website – how long do users stay on the website,
which page is causing users to leave most often, how many pages on average users
view
• When users visit your website – date & time of their visits, you can see how the user
found you.
• Whether visitors came to your website through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo,
etc.), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), a link from another website, or a direct
type-in.
Ultimately, we can all use this data to get actionable insights and use them to take steps
to improve our website and provide them with a great user experience.
What are the main Google Analytics features?
• Built-In reports, Dashboards and Real-time analytics
• Advanced: Custom reports, Cohort analysis, Goal-flow charts, custom dimensions &
custom metrics
How to use Google Analytics?
1. Create a Gmail account – to be able to use Google Analytics, you will need
to have a Google account. Click here to create one
2. Once created the account, send me your newly created Gmail account to
Stanislav.Prodanov@umassmed.edu and I will grant you access to Google analytics
for your website.
3. You will receive an email from noreply-analytics@google.com with a subject line:
You have been granted access to a property in Google Analytics account
Follow the instructions in the email (i.e. click on the link provided in the email)
4. Sign in to Google Analytics (click on the green button on the top right corner)
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5. You will see the main Google Analytics panel. Choose the account and
the view corresponding to your website.
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6. This is what you will see & this is how you will know that you have access to Google
Analytics
7. Add a bookmark (press Ctrl+D at the same time). Save it in the bookmarks bar. In
the name field write just “Google Analytics”. Then open another window in your
browser, go to your bookmark bar and find the newly saved bookmark “Google
Analytics”. Click on it and drag it so as to move it where you can see it (the next
time you click on that book mark you will access Google Analytics).
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Google Analytics Interface
(1) Dashboards & reports
(2) Navigation – home, reporting, customization, admin
(3) Time-period – here you will select the time period you want to analyze
(4) Main view – where the reports and the data are presented
Date Range
The date range selector is at the top right of every page. By default, Google
Analytics will show data for the past 30 days. To select a date range, click the
arrow next to the existing date range to open the selector. Once you’ve selected a
new date range, click Apply to update your report.
To use a predefined date range, select one of the following from the Date Range menu:
• Custom: Data for your custom date range.
• Today: Data available for the current calendar date up until the time of your selection
• Yesterday: Data for the previous calendar date
• Last Week: Data for Sunday through Saturday of the previous calendar week
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• Last Month: Data for the first to last day of the previous calendar month
Dashboards
Dashboards are a collection of widgets that give you an overview of the reports
and metrics you care about most. Dashboards let you monitor many metrics at
once, so you can quickly check the health of your accounts or see correlations
between different reports.
Audience Overview
This report gives you a quick overview of the overall performance of the website
– number of sessions, users (both new and returning), page views, average
session duration, bounce rate, new sessions.
When you launch Google Analytics, you see the overview of the Audience report
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a) Location
The location report provides information about the geographic location of your
users (i.e. Country). To see the State and the City where your users come from,
click on the interactive map.
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(b) New vs. Returning Users
This report provides information about the total number of visitor to your website and
further breaks down that number into new vs returning users.
(c) Browser & OS
This report provides information about what browsers people have used to access your
website
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(d) Mobile Overview
This report provides information about the devices category people have used to
access your website (desktop vs mobile vs tablet)
Acquisition Overview
This report gives you a quick overview of the top channels of your website traffic –
direct traffic, organic search, referral, social media, display advertising, email and paid
search (i.e. AdWords)
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(a) Source/Medium
This report provides information about both the source (i.e. the origin of your
traffic, such as a search engine (for example, google) or a domain
(example.com)) and the medium (i.e. the general category of the source, for
example, organic search (organic), cost-per-click paid search (CPC), web
referral (referral)) of the traffic data.
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(b) Referrals
The referrals report provides information about the segment of your web
traffic that arrives to the website through another source, like through a link
on another domain.
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(c) AdWords, SEO & Social
This report provide information about your current and past AdWords campaigns, the
performance of your website on search engine results (SEO) and traffic from social
media websites
Behavior Overview
The Behavior overview report reveals what pages people visit on your website and
what actions they take while visiting. It also provides information about the number
of page views, bounce rate & exit rate
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(a) Behavior Flow
The Behavior Flow report visualizes the path users traveled from one page or
Event to the next. This report can help you discover what content keeps users
engaged with your site. The Behavior Flow report can also help identify
potential content issues.
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(b) Site Content/All Pages
This report provides information about which are the most visited webpages of your
website.
(c ) Landing Pages
The Landing Pages report provides information about which is the first page
people visit when they land on our website.
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(d) Exit Pages
The Exit Pages report provides information about which is the last page
people visit before they leave our website.
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Real-Time
The Real-Time Report allows you to monitor activity as it happens on your
website – e.g. how many people are on your site right now, which pages or
events they're interacting with, and which goal conversions have occurred.
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In-Page Analytics
The in-Page report allows you to see how customers interact with your web
pages (i.e. what they click)
Google Analytics in EPi Server
Google Analytics gadget is integrated with our
content management systems – EPiServer and
provides users with direct access to their sites
analytics through EPiServer with no need to log
into a Google Analytics account.
Highlights of the dashboard gadget:
• Campaign performance, tracking visitors` interaction
• Acquisition metrics and demographics,
behaviors on page, tracking of completed
goals and events.
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Toggle Navigation Panel –> Settings –> Add Gadgets –> All –> –> Google Analytics
Google Analytics metrics to track regularly
• Users | Audience –> Overview
• New vs Returning Visitors | Audience –> Behavior –> New vs Returning
• Bounce Rate| Audience –> Overview
• Landing Pages | Behavior –> Site Content –> landing Pages
• Exit Pages | Behavior –> Site Content –> Exit Pages
• Source/Medium| Acquisition –> All Traffic –> Exit Pages
• Average session duration | Behavior –> Site Content –> All Pages
• Page Views| Behavior –> Site Content –> All Pages
Google Analytics Resources
1. Official resources from google
a. Analytics Academy - https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer
b. Support - https://support.google.com/analytics/?hl=en#
c. YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/googleanalytics
d. Google Analytics blog http://analytics.blogspot.com/
2. Other resources
a. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/50-resources-for-getting-the-most-out-of-google-
analytics/
b. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/real-time-reports-google-analytics/
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