Video transcript

This video will walk you through a quick tour of the Google analytics or GA for short user interface. Now, as you’re looking over the information being supplied by your GA reports, you should be thinking how is this information going to help you better optimize your site and the content that you put there.

By default, unless you customize the look of your Google analytics reporting pages, the default page you will more than likely land on is the audience overview page. That’s where we’re at right now and you’ll notice too that in most all of these, you’re going to have an overview section, traffic overview, audience overview, real time overview and so on, but the overview section should be looked at as more of a trend instead of a definitive fact.

For example, here on the visits, this shows how many times your site was visited, but what if one person visited your site 1474 times, that’s not going to give you a pretty accurate account of just how popular your site is, except for that one person. Unique visitors come into play. This, according to Google analytics, and as you can see as I hover over these, a little pop up shows up to give you further explanation as to what this particular metric is about, but unique visitors will give you a better idea as to how many different or unique people showed up to your site. But even this number can be a little misleading because if a particular visitor were to have visited your site 3 different times, but did so through a different browser each time or each time they got out of their browser, they cleared the cookies, then Google analytics would show that person as 3 different people.  Again, look at these as trends instead of definitive facts.

To drill down even further, go ahead and click on this graph icon to the left of the number and it will give you more details right up here. As you can hover over each one of these nodes, it will pop up with the information related to that particular date. To get this date range up top here, come on up here in the top right corner. Hit that drop down arrow wand you can select the date range. By default, that’s going to come up with 30 days, and a cool thing about this too is that, not only can you customize this date range but you can also compare the date range you choose a previous date range. So if you did some optimizing last year or last month, last week, and you want to compare it to the current year, month, or week, then you have that ability right here.  In addition to showing you by the date, you can also go by the hour, week, or month using these parameters here.

Granted you do have the ability to drill down a little bit using the information here in the overview section but you really should get in the habit of drilling down over here in the left side bar. For example, under demographics, yes you could come over here but let’s go ahead and go over here instead and click on language or location, behavior, which by the way gives you information on how visitors are interacting with the content on your site. Are they coming back for more? Do they leave comments? How often do they visit and revisit?

Now the technology here, that’s pretty cool too. Just when you think that nobody is using internet explorer 7 anymore, well you click on the browser and OS, oh, I got 8 people. Actually I’m really surprised that there are actually 6 people using internet explorer 6. So you can be surprised. And you can even check out screen resolutions, screen color, flash version, and the all important other.

Traffic sources and audience is probably the 2 most important areas you’re going to be checking out on the side bar over here. While I could go into great detail on each one of these, the video may end up being two hours in length. So to avoid that, let me go ahead and tell you that if you come over here to the help section in the top right corner, and click on the help center, it will open up in the new window, but right down here under interface map, click on that, and it will give you a bit of a map of the entire interface and each one of these color coded circle numbers will be broken down for you down here at the bottom. Blue, yellow, green, and red.  As you can see, some of these have links to other pages that further explain that particular element.

One thing too while I’m here, let me go ahead and close this up. Another thing that I just recently noticed in my GA reports is up here. Right now we’ve got this bar graph but you can also get line charts and, this is pretty cool as it just pops up off the screen here and says motion chart. You want to click on that and right now we’re in the browser section. If we hover over these, you can see the different browser names to check this out.  You can customize this even further over here.

Well let’s go ahead and hit the play button.  You see the date and it tells you how active each one of those browsers are. Okay. Anyway, you get the idea. This is probably for people that have more time on their hands than they should actually have.

Up here at the top, you’ve got some customizations. You can go into your admin section, the home section, and again a lot of this stuff is explained to you in further detail than what I have time for in this short video, right here on that interface map page that I’ve should you.

And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on a tour of the Google analytics user interface. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.
Related Videos:
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Account Setup
Goolge Analytics Introduction – User Interface Tour
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Customize your Dashboard
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Adding Users
Goolge Analytics Introduction – Defining Goals

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