Posts Tagged ‘Google Analytics’

Back in May I wrote a post called “how do they find you?” which referenced Google Analytics and tracking the statistics of traffic and visitors to your site. This is something I set up for any new client I work with, and include as part of a basic Search Engine Optimization package that Purple Star Consulting offers. Using it just to view how many people have looked at your site is one thing, but this free service truly offers comprehensive ad hock reporting, it’s a shame not to be using it or understand all that it’s showing you.

When you first log in, you will be shown some basic statistics. The green check mark is important, this means that Google is still able to track that you have the necessary code in your website pages. If you see anything BUT the green check mark, let your web designer know. This means that your visitors are not currently being checked. In the screen shot above, it is showing how many visitors came to my site within a week. It also compares this with the previous week and shows if that count is up or down percentage wise in comparison. Looking at this, I am down 21.43% from the prior week. However, if I look at a month range, I can see that in October I am up 54.94% from Septembers visitors.

To get to the Dashboard area, simply click on the View report link. This will take you to an overview of Site Usage,  Visitors, Content, Map Overla, Traffic Sources and Goals. This gives you a brief view of each area. From there you can drill down to get more detailed numbers. The first thing to notice is the date. by default, the last date it shows will always be yesterday. Perhaps it is Thursday night and you had sent out a newsletter that morning. Want to see how many visitors you had? You will need to change the end date to today. Here is how.

Go up to the dates, and click on the small downward pointing arrow. The following drop down calendars will appear. With the first date in the range selected, click on the date you want from the calendars. Next, select the end date range you want (this is where you can select today’s date).  You can also check Compare to Past which will allow you to compare to a previous time frame. Think of comparing different days or weeks when you sent out newsletters, or a time when you had a sale or promotion going on. Great to compare how things are improving (or not).

Once I have the date range I am interested in, I can then go down to see my visitors. It’s great to see how many people have come out to my site each week. However, what is even more interesting is to see how many are new visitors, or unique visitors. This means that more people are finding my site (I can find out how by looking at the Traffic Sources section to see Keywords and Links used to find me). When I drill down to the Unique Visitors, I can see how many came each day: What I can also do, is use the Map Overlay section to see where the visitors are coming from. With this, I have to drill down to the country first (United States in my case), then drill down to the State (Georgia is where I market) and then see the cities. This gives me an idea if the right people are finding me, meaning, can they use my services rather than a visitor from Botswana finding me. You can change the view to a pie chart for a simple visualization from the views on the right of the page above your statistics.

So, I can see how many unique visitors I have had, and I can also see where all of my visitors are from, but how about seeing them both together? That is where the Custom Reporting comes in handy. Click on Custom Reporting from the navigation on the right hand side of the screen. Next, click on Manage Custom Reports, then from the top right of the next screen, click on Create New Custom Report. The reports are created by dragging and dropping fields that you want to track on a report. They are separated out into Dimensions and Metrics. See below for the items I used to create a report for Unique Visitors By City (the name of the report is changed by clicking edit next to the current name). I want to see the number of Unique Visitors, with the number of Page Views, then drill down to the City Level. I save the report then go to view it.

Once you are looking at the report, drill down till you get the cities in view. From here, you can use the Export button at the top. This will then give you a variety of ways in which you can export the report for review, PDF, XML, CSV or CSV for Excel. Click here for a PDF version of the report that I exported.  Next, click on the link for Email. You can e-mail the report to yourself, or anyone else just one time, or set a schedule to send the statistics to your self on a weekly, daily or monthly basis. Finally, click on Add to Dashboard. This will add the report to the initial Dashboard page of Google Analytics. It will be added to the bottom of the Dashboard, but you can simply click and drag it further up the page if you wish.

Then, next time you log in, you will automatically see these statistics. There are so many possibilities for custom reports. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not too difficult. Please let us know if you have any questions, wonder if it’s possible to create a specific report, or want to learn more.

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