In this video, I’m gonna show you some of the important information you can learn about your website simply by looking at your Google Analytics statistics program.
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Once you’ve installed Google Analytics and you’ve allowed it to collect data from your website for about 30 days, then you can have a look at your account, and you’ll probably see something like this.
The graph that you see right on top here shows you the amount of unique visitors that you get to your website on a daily basis, and you can also choose to view the statistics by weekly basis or you can choose to see the amount of traffic that you get every single month.
Now, the first statistic here shows you the amount of unique visitors you had to your website in the past 30 days. And the second one shows you the amount of Pageviews, which is the amount of pages actually viewed by the visitors to your website, and this will, of course, be at least double the amount of the actual visitors. And you can see here the amount of pages per visitor.
Next, you can see the Bounce Rate – the average time each visitor spent on your site, and also the percentage of new visits to your website. So if you scroll down, again, you’ll be able to see the amount of visitors; and then you can see the Map Overlay, which shows you your countries from which your website visitors are coming from. So in this particular website, you can see that the majority of visitors are from the United States, and that’s why it’s in a very dark green shape, and then also this country here, Malaysia…and then we also have several visitors from Australia, India, and the United Kingdom. But these are all in a lighter shade of green, which means that there are less people from those regions visiting your website. And let’s click on ‘view report’ to take an in-depth look at the actual countries from which our website visitors are coming from.
So now, you can see the map in detail, right? And you can see all the different shades of green. So the darkest green, of course, shows you where most of your visitors are coming from. And if you scroll down, you can see in detail the names of the countries, and also the percentage of visitors that you get from those countries. Now, I’m gonna click back to Dashboard.
Now, the next graph I wanna talk about is the Traffic Sources Overview. So you can easily see here the amount of traffic you get from the search engines; the amount of traffic you get from other sites; and the amount of direct traffic you get, which is mostly from email marketing, or by people manually typing your website URL into the browser, or from social bookmarks, etc. So I’m gonna click on ‘view report’ again to see this report in-depth.
So if I scroll down here, I’ll be able to see all the top traffic sources as well as all the keywords you use to find this website in the search engines. So I’m gonna see a full report on that – I’m gonna click on ‘view full report’ – and here, you can see the keywords typed in by the visitors to find this website in Google. So let’s click back to your dashboard…and of course, different types of data may be more valuable to use compared to someone else; so the good thing is that Google Analytics allows you to customize your dashboard so that you can have a quick glance at the stats or the data that is most important to you.
So for example, assuming traffic sources is the most important thing right here, so I’m just gonna click on this, and then I’m gonna hold down my mouse button, and then I’m gonna drag it and drop it in an available location, and as you move this along, you’ll see that the other boxes start to shift locations, and you’ll see a light gray box where you can just put this over and just drop it – release your mouse button to drop it in certain places.
And if you do not want to see a particular report right on your dashboard, then you can also click on the X button to close and to remove this picture, or this module, from the dashboard.
Now, let’s go back to the map overlay that I showed you earlier, and I’m gonna show you how to add certain reports directly to your dashboard. So if assuming you wanna see the actual states where your visitors are coming from, then you can just click on the country that you want…I’m gonna click on United States…and here, you can see a much better map, which actually shows you the individual states. And again, the darkest shade of green represents the most amount of traffic. So you can see here that in The United States alone, most of my visitors are coming from California, followed by Texas, Florida, etc., and those white regions here – it basically means that you’re not getting any traffic at all from those regions.
So this is really important information if you’re doing a local business or if you have a local business-oriented website and you wanna make sure that you are actually targeting the correct areas, or the correct states.
So if I want to add this to my dashboard, then just – at the top here, you will see a link here that says Add to Dashboard. So I’m gonna click Add to Dashboard, okay? It says, “Your report has been added. View dashboardâ€.
Now, you can see my main dashboard here, and the website statistics right on top here. But if you scroll down, then now, I can also see the US Map Overlay. So if I wanna move this again, I can just click on this, drag it, and release it wherever I want.
So now, I can make sure that all information I really need, I can just access them really easily using Google Analytics. If you’re sharing your website stats with someone else in your team or in your organization, or if for any reason you need to give it to someone else, then you can just click on Export, and you can export all your stats to PDF or XML. Or you can also click on Email and you can email this report to anyone that you want.
So that’s how you use Google Analytics to really study your website and to get an in-depth insight into what’s actually happening with your website visitors.