Google Analytics Introduction
How to use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful application that tracks and reports website traffic patterns and data to gain customer insights.
Below is the list of information we can gain about the website using Google Analytics:
- How many people visited the website?
- How many people are currently on the website?
- Where do the users live?
- What time of day do the users visit the website?
- How many people are visiting through mobile?
- What other websites send traffic to our website?
- Which pages on our website are the most popular?
- What are the current top active pages?
- How long do visitors stay on the website?
- What are the demographic of the visitors?
- Each time you log in to Google Analytics, you will be taken to your Google Analytics Home which is an overview of the Audience report.
Home Dashboard
The home dashboard shows an overview of Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate and Session Duration.
Terminology
- Users: The number of users who have initiated at least one session during the date range
- Sessions: Total number of sessions within the date range – a session is the period time a user is actively engaged with the website
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there is no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds
- Session Duration: The average length of a session
- If you click on the bottom left corner of the graph where it says 7 days, you can change the date range to view the data from different dates.
The home dashboard also shows what time the users visit the website the most and real-time data of how many users are currently on the website and which pages they are on.
You can also view the active users on the website by monthly, weekly and daily as well as user retention and sessions by device.
Google Analytics shows that it's about an even split between Mobile and Desktop users which is why responsive design is very important since almost half of the users are on the website through mobile.
Behavior Dashboard
You can also see which pages have the most views and top hits. To see more detailed report on the popular pages, you can click on the left hand menu Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
You can see the total page views of a page and it is ordered by the most page views during the certain date range. You can also search for a page in the search bar and click on the page to see more detailed data and information.
Audience Dashboard
In the Audience overview dashboard, you can view the demographic of the users. Also, when clicking on the browser, you can see which browsers are used by the Audience, which operating systems are used, etc.