Do you need a deeper understanding of Google Analytics? Do you know what data each section of Google Analytics offers? A few important details and settings can improve your Google Analytics reporting. In this article we’ll share the basics of navigating Google Analytics and what you need to set up now to make the most of its data.
Google Analytics Quick Glossary
Before we begin, there a few terms you should know. You'll see them often in your Google Analytics data, and we'll use them throughout this post.
Dimensions: Dimension is a descriptive attribute or characteristic of an object that can be given different values. Browser, Exit Page, Screens and Session Duration are all examples of dimensions that appear by default in Google Analytics.
Metrics: It is individual elements of a dimension that can be measured as a sum or a ratio. Screen views, Pages/Session and Average Session Duration are examples of metrics in Google Analytics.
Sessions: A session is the period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc., within a date range. All usage data (Screen views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.
Users :Users who have had at least one session within the selected date range includes both new and returning users.
Page views :Page views means the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Pages/Session: Average Page Depth is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Avg. Session Duration: The average length of a session.
Bounce Rate : Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
New Sessions : An estimate of the percentage of first-time visits.
Goals : Goals let you measure how often users take or complete specific actions on your website.
Conversions: Conversions are the number of times goals have been completed on your website.
Campaigns: Campaigns (also known as custom campaigns) allow you to add parameters to any URL from your website to collect more information about your referral traffic.
Acquisition: Acquisition is how you acquire users.
Behavior: Behavior data helps you improve your content.
Google Analytics Home
When you log into Google Analytics, you end up on the Home page where you can see a list of all of the websites you have set up in your account. This list shows you some basic data right off the bat such as your number of sessions, average session duration, bounce rate and goal conversion rate.
You can use the search box under the date range to search for a particular domain. If you only want to view the domains that are most critical to your business, you can mark them with a star and change the Show settings to list only the starred websites. You can use the date range to see your data over any specified time period. You can also use it to compare the current time period to a previous time period to see the change in sessions, average session duration, bounce rate and goal conversion rate.
So far, Google Analytics to understand the information was basic information. Next week we'll talk about Google reporting. Until then you can start by getting yourself an Analytics account.