Published on Nov 28, 2011
Dashboards When you login to the new interface, you will see something like this:
This is the default Dashboard that Analytics now provides. The amazing thing about these is that you can customize them almost infinitely. You can also create more than one. So, you can create a Dashboard to look at your overall metrics, and another to look at your ecommerce metrics, and another to look at your goals / events / conversions, and another to look at a specific form of marketing. The possibilities are endless. That is your Dashboard on the Home tab. We love these so much here at Adpearance that we have started using them to track metrics for our teams and for our clients. They provide a great snapshot view of the important metrics for a variety of different situations. In addition, each widget on the Dashboard can be connected to a report, which provides a great deal more information. Standard Reporting Visitors Overview: Usually the first page you see when you view the Standard Reporting section.
Demographics: Has different tabs to show different information about your users:
- Location: The location of your users (can be viewed by nation, state, or city).
- Language: The language they used to access your website.
- Custom Variables: The tab called “Custom Variables” is only set if you create custom tracking to define your user-base.
- User Defined: The User Defined Value also needs to be customized to be useful.
- New vs. Returning: Breaks down your new and returning users and shows the basic statistics for those different user types.
- Frequency & Recency: Shows the number of times visitors have returned to your website and how frequently they return.
- Engagement: Shows how long your visitors stayed and how many pages they viewed.
- Brower & OS: Browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.) and Operating System (Windows, iPhone, etc.).
- Network: How do your users access the internet? For example, are they using Comcast or Qwest?
- Overview: Simply tells you the basics on whether or not your users are using mobile devices.
- Devices: Breaks down site usage statistics by devices.
Sources: Breaks down your types of traffic so that you can see how users behave on your site when they come from different source and mediums.
- All Traffic: Provides an overview of all sources, provided with their relevant onsite statistics.
- Direct: Shows details on people who have visited site by typing your domain name (web address) directly into their search bar.
- Referrals: Shows details on your users who have visited your site through a link on another site. (They clicked a link on another site and used it to navigate to your site.)
- Search: Has 2 tabs to break down organic and paid search. The “Campaign” tab has to be customized to hold relevant data. The “Paid” tab might also require some customization.
- Organic: People who have clicked on your website in the search results.
- Paid: People who have clicked on one of your ads in a search engine like Google or Bing (or possibly through a display network like Facebook).
- Queries: Shows search queries where your site appeared, the average position, and the number of clicks your site received.
- Landing Pages: Shows the top pages that people are using to enter your site through Google.
- Geographical Summary: This shows how often your site is displaying to people in different territories and how many of them are visiting the site when it appears.
- Pages: What pages are people visiting? How long are they staying on those pages? Are they going to any pages after that?
- Content Drilldown: Providing virtually the same details as the Pages tab, but at the directory level. (For those of you who don’t know, a directory looks like this “/blog” and is helpful for categorizing pages. So a page called “yourdomain.com/blog/this-is-my-blog-post” would be in the /blog directory.)
- Landing Pages: What pages do people use to enter the site?
- Exit Pages: What pages do people most frequently leave to exit the site?
Adsense: This applies if you are running Adsense on your website. We don’t use in our Analytics because none of our clients are running Adsense on your site. Adsense is a program that Google offers to place ads on your site.
In-Page Analytics: This section is amazing. It loads your website in the Analytics tab and shows you how people moved around your site. You can where they clicked and what percentage clicked on which links.
Conversions
Goals: These are goals that someone performed on your website. They could be items like making a purchase, signing up for an email newsletter, or other items. They have to be set up to work.
Ecommerce: This section only applies to ecommerce websites. It shows information like total revenue and revenue by product.
Multi-Channel Funnels: These can be rather complicated, but basically they show you how many people have had a conversion on your website and which different marketing channels played into that conversion. For example, if your goal is “Order Completion” and most people purchased after going directly to your website, you might be able to see that they originally visited organically or through paid search, which gives you an idea of how valuable those channels can be; they are assisting in more people knowing about your business, so they can know your web address and type it into their browser and come purchase from you.
Final Thoughts
One last thing – really important – you can always change the date at the upper right to see any of these statistics in a different date range or to compare date ranges.
Hopefully this gave you the confidence to explore Analytics and its wealth of data and helped you to understand what is behind of the mysterious or anonymous sections.
There is a big difference between knowing where to find information in Analytics and where to find the right information. I will be writing about that more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, happy data-hunting!
