Learning about Google Analytics and 10 Tips to get started

Lots of information about visits to your website, all for free!

When I first started working with websites, there were “website logs”. There still are in fact. Somewhere, lurking out there on a computer that looks after your website are hosts of files containing data about who has looked at your site and when. Gradually these “logs” or “stats” became more friendly with nice coloured graphics, but they were still rather tricky to get hold of at times and then not always easy to understand.

Move on to today and now we have the power of Google and Google Analytics. Whenever Fresh Approach write a new website, we will usually recommend that you have Google Analytics on your website, so if you don’t remember being told about it, then please ask. You will have been asked to set up a Google mail account, if you didn’t have one already. And then we either created an Analytics account for your or share the account we are looking at. So if you don’t remember receiving anything like that, you may not have Analytics running on your site currently. Don’t worry – it’s easy to add and well worth it as I hope to prove below.

If you have forgotten how to access your Google Analytics: here’s a reminder. Analytics is fairly easy to use and I would encourage you just to sign in and have a look. However here are 10 tips about Google Analytics to get you started.

1. Did you know you can drag around the boxes on the dashboard to get it to look just the way you want? You can’t move the main graph at the top, but anything with darker grey bars at the top you can move. Just move your mouse onto the bar, hold the mouse button and drag. If you want to close the box completely, just click the little “x” to the right of the box header.
2. The date range of the statistics that you are looking at is usually the last month. If you want to look at a different range, click on the date range box on the right opposite the heading “Dashboard”. Then you can choose any dates you wish.
3. You can view your main graph in all sorts of ways. To the top left of the graph there is a drop down menu. Normally it is set to Visits, but you can choose any of the main headings that also appear just below the graph, i.e. Pageviews, Bounce Rate, etc. Also to the top right of the graph, you can view your stats by day, week or month. Normally you view them by day. (Beware, if you click to view your stats by month you may get just a rather general downward line. To get back to the original view, click on Day again. Took me a little while to realise that. I was looking for a Reset button and there isn’t one!)
4. What is “Bounce Rate”? Bounce Rate is when a visitor comes to your site, only visits one page and bounces straight off to another site. There is a good description of bounce rate at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate. However don’t necessarily worry if your bounce rate is high. It may be that visitors have come to read just that one article that they were looking for. See my next point.
5. You can compare two metrics on the graphs which can be very useful, particularly when looking at bounce rates. Choose your bounce rate graph by clicking on the graph image next to the words. (Don’t click on the words because that will take you to another page.). Then click in the grey bar just above the graph where it now says ‘bounce rate. A box will open showing the option you have chosen. At the top of that box it will say compare two metrics. If you click on that, you will see another list of boxes appear and you can choose ‘average time on site’. Now you can see better whether people are coming to the site and leaving immediately or staying to read. (Remember, they may just have dashed in to check your phone number or something).
6. Moving on, lets go down to the Visitors Overview and click ‘view report’ at the bottom of that box. Percentage of new visits in the last month is quite interesting, but the main one of interest to me here is over on the right: ‘browser profile’. What browsers are people using to visit your site and does your site work well in all of them. It’s worth checking.
7. Need a print out of this report? At the top of every screen in Analytics there is a button with ‘export’ written on it. You can export any of the reports to pdf format which means you can print them, email them or put them on your website.
8. You can also build up your Dashboard by selecting “add to dashboard” from any of these sub-pages. Since you can export the dashboard to pdf as well, you can create a nice looking report with just the data that you want to see on there and then put it out to pdf.
9. Under Traffic Sources in the left hand menu, check out Referring Sites. Very useful if you have been working on your directory submissions – are they really working? Are the directories sending you visitors. This might be another one to add to your dashboard for quick reference.
10. Similarly look at keywords here. These are the key words and phrases that visitors are putting into a search engine and coming up with your site. Are there words there that are not currently included in your keyword lists? Should they be added?

This is just the start with Analytics. There is a whole lot of other things you can do but if you get started with the points above then you will have a working knowledge of the way Analytics is laid out. Then we can move onto other things.

Have fun!

This entry was posted on December 8, 2010 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Organise life online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.