This is the comprehensive and complete Google Analytics Tutorial for Beginners where we have explained every tool of analytics.
Google Analytics Tools: Google Analytics Tutorial
As we have already introduced you with Google Analytics in our previous articles i.e. How to setup Analytics account and Introduction to Google Analytics tools, today we will learn about every tool of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Tutorial: Features Explanation
A. Audience Overview
The Graph at the front screen basically shows the visitor trend on your website. You can play with the graph by changing it to “Day”, “Month”, “Week” etc. This is a nice feature of Google analytics to keep track of the number of visitors.
Link to Analytics: Click Me
B. Technical Terms: Google Analytics Tutorial
C. Visits:
This option basically tells the total visits to your website within a specific period of time.
Case 1: Same user visits again before 30 minutes = 1 Visit
Case 2: Same user visit after 30 minutes or midnight = 2 Visit
- Unique Visitors: This is for every new visitor that opens your blog in a specific time period
- Page Views: This tells how many pages someone opens in a specific period
- Unique Page View: The same visitor visiting the various pages will be counted as 1 Unique Page view
Important Comparisons:
- Unique Pageviews VS Page Views: Person visit site 5 times = 5 page views but counted as only 1 unique page views
- Unique Visitor VS Unique Page View: The unique visitors can be increased by deleting a cookie of our browser but they will still count it as 1 unique page view by the same visitor
- Pages / Visit: The average number of pages visits by a specific user
- Average Visit Duration: The average time spent on the website by each visitor
- Bounce Rate: when users come to your site and leave immediately, it adds to its bounce rate
Case 1: User found the content on the landing page
Case 2: Your website content does not satisfy the user need
- Exit Rate: The last page viewed by a user, the exit rate could be minimized by adding links to other content on each page
- % new visit: The average number of unique visitors that come to your site
So, this was all about the technical terms available in the Audience Overview section. Now let’s explore the top bar section of Google Analytics.
Top Bar of Google Analytics:
D. Home Icon:
It gives you the list of the websites linked to this specific Google Analytics account.
E. Customization:
It enables you to create custom reports we have learned various technical terms in the above section. Now we can pick any of the terms we are interested in viewing on our dashboard and can create custom reports to analyze the data.
Creating Custom Report: Click Me
Hit Save and see below the final result:
F. Admin Tab:
- View Setting: It comprises information like Date and Time Zone, Searches Setting and also contains some confidential information like View ID
- Goals: You can create setup custom Goals you would like to visit within some specific period
- Segment: These are specifically designed to display analytics to isolate specific traffic coming to your website
- Annotation: You can annotate a specific set of data with important events.
Example: Let’s annotate the graph when we have maximum traffic.
Analyze the graph and see the date on which we have maximum traffic. Click on the segment of a graph and the option seen in the image to set the annotation.
- Attribution Model: Attribution modeling is an intense topic and also a very broad topic. It is the model that specified a rule or set of rules, that determines how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touch points in conversion paths. We have various types of attribution models which assign different credit based on the conversion
- Channel Grouping: A channel group is a set of labels where each label applies to a channel or a group of channels you would like to see in airports. So when you define the channel grouping, you specify which channels belong to which level.
- Custom Alerts: You can set custom alerts and analytics will let you know when your set alert is met. For example, you set a custom alert when you reach 1000 visitors per day and analytics will let you know when that condition met
- Scheduled Email: Get scheduled emails regarding your website performance in your inbox from Google Analytics
- Shortcuts: This is a really cool feature to remember your settings. You don’t have to
reconfigure a report each time you open it. So, to create a shortcut, you go over to the reporting tab and basically, you just make some customizations according to your needs and then conceived as a shortcut, and it will show up in your dashboards
G. Share Assets:
It allows you to share mainly custom reports and dashboards.
Now we have explored the Top Bar and Audience Overview section, let’s jump on Side Bar and explain the important options available there:
Side Bar of Google Analytics
H. Dashboard: Google Analytics Tutorial
Here you have all the widgets in one place. You can add them, delete them or do anything you want with them.
I. Intelligence Events:
Here we have two types of events first is automatic that Google Analytics will tell you if something strange happens in your website and the other is a Custom type that we create manually.
J. Standard Report:
It will give you each and every information regarding user activity. Some of them are the following:
- Visitors to your site (live)
- The page they are viewing
- Location
- Page views per minute
- Traffic sources: comes directly or via the search engine or via backlink, etc
- Referral source: if comes directly = 0 if via the search engine, social media then it will show you the referral link, etc.
K. Audience:
As we discussed earlier under Audience overview section it will give us graphical analysis based on various technical terms. In addition, this it will also tell us the following Demographics:
- Language
- Country
- City
- browser
- Operating System (OS)
- Service provider etc.
L. Visitor Flow:
It will tell us the source from where the visitors are coming from and a lot of other information related to visitor activity.
M. Acquisition:
The sources of your visitors’ knowledge of your presence are displayed here. Either they are Organic, direct, referral or social media
We can also go deep down into the Data and can explore the following:
- Channel: It will tell you the various technical terms we discussed earlier i.e.% new visit, bounce rate Avg. Visit duration, etc.
- All Traffic: Is it either organic, via the website, PPC or any other
- All Referrals: All the websites linking to your website (backlinks)
- Campaigns: Mainly concerned about Google AdWords Campaign
- Keywords: It will categorize the keywords that users type to end up finding your website. These can be via organic or Paid results
- Cost Analysis: It the cost of your investment in the website with the revenue you generated. It will help you calculate ROI (Return on Investment)
N. Google AdWords:
Google AdWords is an excellent place to be if you have an AdWords campaign going on. You can link your AdWords account to your analytics account and get plenty of information on how your campaign is doing. I highly recommend linking your AdWords, because it allows you to view your AdWords click and cost data alongside your analytics site engagement data.
- Campaigns: Link your analytics with AdWords to check how your campaign is progressing. You can monitor and change the match search query, keywords, clicks, and other information.
- AdWords Keywords: You can check which keyword is getting you more traffic. You can refine other keywords accordingly to get maximum clicks
- Day Parts: It will allow you to analyze stats on an hourly, daily or weekly basis
- Destination URLs: These are basically the landing pages where your users are getting redirected after clicking on your site
- Keyword Positions: This will give you info regarding the position of your Ad for a specific keyword and its related clicks
O. Social:
All the social websites linking to your blog and people coming from there can be seen.
- Overview: It will give you information regarding out of total visits how many came from any social network and also specify which social platform
- Network Referrals: It will give you an in-depth analysis of visitors coming from various social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
- Data Hub Activity: It will tell you about which links the users have shared and on what platforms
- Landing Page: The page where the users first come to after clicking your link to your website/ webpage that was shared on social platforms
- Trackbacks: It tells you about all the backlinks to your website
- Plugins: If you have set the Facebook likes button on your site, then you can analyze its success by checking this page
- Visitor Flow: Visits coming from social platforms can be analyzed here
P. Search Engine Optimization:
It will tell you the following information like queries people are trying to reach your website, landing page at which they are coming and the geography at which they fall
Q. Behavior:
This option will help you in examining the behaviour of your visitors and your websites like landing pages, exit pages, site speed, AdSense etc.
- Overview: This is your audience overview section discussed earlier
- Behavior Flow: The behavior of visitors like their landing page, the page they visit, where they go from the first page and the exit page are all shown here
- Site content: It will give you the information pertaining to all the pages that users visit on your site, their landing page and exit pages as well
- Site Speed: Get details regarding Page loading speed, speed suggestion
- Site Search: Sometimes we set up the search engine within our site and to keep track of user searches and this option is useful for this purpose
- Even Tracking: Enable you to track what your users see, download, bookmarked, etc
- AdSense: It will summarize info like money you are earning, clicks getting and other related information
R. Conversion: Google Analytics Tutorial
As discussed earlier in the attribution model this is a real concern if you have an E-Commerce website. You can check your pre-set Goal performance, an attribution model success and other related information.
So, this was all about details information of Google Analytics under this google analytics turotial.
Learn How to Link Google Analytics with your website: Setup Google Analytics
Quick Overview of Google Analytics: Website Analysis using Analytics