Once you have your Google Analytics account up and running, you will start getting a lot of different reports that will help you know which areas of your website need improvement. To an absolute beginner, those reports and pie charts may seem a bit confusing, which is exactly why the rest of this guide will be of immense help.
By the end of it, you will understand the information your reports will provide you with, as well as what some key metrics are, and you will be able to easily find your way around your Google Analytics dashboard.
There are four main tabs in your Google Analytics account: Home, Reporting, Customization, and Admin tab. Take a look at what you will find under each of them so that you can better understand your data.
1. Home Tab
On your Home tab, you will be able to take a look at the quick overview of your account. If you have more than one website under your account, you will be shown a list of all of them, so that you can easily choose the one for which you want to see the reports on your website traffic.
On this tab, you will also be provided with important data regarding your sessions, average session duration, bounce rate and goal conversion rate for each and every one of the websites you may have. Here is a quick overview of what each of those actually mean, as they will be discussed in detail later.
Sessions – The Sessions column shows the sum of all the interactions on your website that occurred within a particular timeframe.
Avg. Session Duration – The Average Session Duration column shows the average duration of all the sessions that took place on your website within a particular timeframe.
Bounce Rate – The Bounce Rate column shows the percentage of users who have left your website at some point, that is, who have “bounced” from your website.
Goal Conversion Rate – The Goal Conversion Rate column shows the sum of the overall conversion rate on your website.
2. Reporting Tab
If you have one website under your account, Google Analytics will take you straight to the Audience Overview report under the Reporting tab every time you log into your account. If you have more than one website, it will take you to the PROPERTY column under the Admin tab, so that you can choose the website for which you want to see the reports, after which you will be taken to your Audience Overview report.
Nevertheless, the Reporting tab in Google Analytics provides you with dashboards and important reports that can give you an insight into how your website is actually performing, so that you can know where and how to make improvements.
3. Real-Time Reports
Real-Time reports provide you with useful information about the website visitors who are currently on your website. Therefore, as the name suggests, you get reports in real-time. In the Real-Time Overview, you can see the exact number of active users on your website, how many of your website pages are being viewed per minute and per second, the top keywords your active users are using, and a list of your top active pages, along with the number of active users per each of those pages.
Apart from the Overview, you can check the other tabs in Real-Time: Location, Traffic Sources, Content, Events and Conversions in order to take a look at the corresponding data regarding your active users.
4. Audience Reports
The Audience reports, as the name suggests, provide you with information about your website visitors. In the Audience Overview tab, you can see how many sessions there are on your website over a particular time period. You can choose to see the hourly, daily, weekly and monthly reports.
Under the graph showing you the number of your sessions for a particular time period, you will be provided with additional information about your audience, including the number of users, the number of pageviews, the number of pages per session, average session duration, bounce rate, and the percentage of new sessions. Also, you will get a pie chart showing you the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors.
Under all of those metrics, you can see where your website visitors are coming from (country, city) and what language they are speaking, as well as what browsers, service providers and operating systems they are using when visiting your website.
In the top right corner of the Audience Overview tab, you can change the date range to choose a time period for which you want to view the reports. You can also check the Compare to box and compare the reports from one date range to some of the previous ones.
When it comes to the graph showing you the overview of all of your sessions for a particular timeframe, you can hover the graph line in order to see the number of sessions for a particular day.
Apart from the Overview tab in Audience reports, you will find a number of other tabs that will provide you with additional information about your website visitors. Those tabs include: Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behavior, Technology, Mobile, Custom, Benchmarking and Users Flow.
The Demographics tab shows you the age and gender of your website visitors. The Interests tab shows you what the interests of your website visitors are, including areas such as technology, movies, travel, news and much more. The Geo tab shows you the locations of your audience and the languages they speak. The Behavior tab shows the behavior of your audience, that is, their interaction with your website (their engagement on your website, whether they are first-time or returning visitors, how often they visit your site).
The Technology and Mobile tabs show you what platform your audience is using when visiting your website (browsers, operating systems, networks, devices). You can use the Custom tab to add custom variables that will help you learn more about your audience over a particular date range.
The Benchmarking tab allows you to compare your date with that of your competition so that you can gain insight into industry trends and target your audience better. However, you can use benchmarking to compare data only with companies that actually share their data. If you use benchmarking, you can choose from three different reports: Channels, Location and Devices.
The Users Flow tab provides you with a graph that shows your audience’s journey through your site, that is, on which page they landed, which pages they viewed and at what point they left your site.
5. Acquisition Reports
The Acquisition reports will show you how your website visitors actually came to your site. It will provide you with an overview of your direct, organic, referral and social (coming from social media) traffic, as well as traffic coming from email. If you use AdWords, you can see how your PPC campaigns are performing. All you need to do is go to the Admin tab and link your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account.
The Search Engine Optimization tab in the Acquisition reports shows you which keywords your website visitors searched for to come to your website. However, in order to use this tab, you need to have a Google Webmaster account and link it to your Google Analytics account.
6. Behavior Reports
The Behavior reports will show you how your website visitors are interacting with your website so that you can know how your content is actually performing. You can view important reports in the following tabs: Behavior Flow, showing you the pages your visitors are navigating, from the landing to the exit page, Experiments, allowing you to conduct A/B testing to see which of your landing pages are performing best, so that you can optimize your conversion goals and In-Page Analytics, allowing you to view your web pages along with your Google Analytics data.
In the Behavior Flow reports, you will find additional reports that can be of great use, including Site Content, Site Speed, Site Search, Events and Publisher reports. The Site Content reports show the content on your site that is performing best, that is, your top pages, your top landing pages, and top exit pages. The Site Speed reports show you how fast your website actually is, along with the pages that may be slowing it down, and it provides you with suggestions on how to speed up your website.
The Site Search reports show you the keywords your website visitors are using on your site, but you need to set up site search in order to be able to view those reports. The Events reports let you track the specific actions of your website visitors, such as downloading your eBook, for instance, or clicking on a particular link. In order to use the Publisher reports, you need to have an AdSense account and link it to your Google Analytics account. If you do that, you can view your AdSense publisher data in the Publisher reports.
