Nora Brown Design

Google Anlaytics: Where to start?

Logging in to Google Analytics can be overwhelming. In this introductory article, I will give an overview of the items you see on the first page of Analytics: the Dashboard. The whole layout can be customized (something you’ll want to do eventually) but here I will cover the default layout.

Visits over the past week

The top item you’ll see is a graph. Though it can be customized, by default it shows visits to your site over a date range of the past week (shown in the upper right corner).

Site Usage

Below that, you’ll see a section called Site Usage which shows a summary of various statistics, all calculated for the same date range:

• Visits – the total visits to your site over the date range shown
• Pageviews – the number of individual pageviews
• Pages/Visit – the average number of pages viewed during a visit
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of people who view only a single page on a site
• Avg. Time on Site – as named
• % New Visits – The percentage of people visiting your site for the first time. The remaining visitors are return traffic.

Continuing down the page, you’ll see Visitors Overview-a repeat of the top graph, and a mini map of your visitors’ locations.

Traffic Sources pie chart, and Top Content Overview

Below this on the left, you’ll see a pie chart of Traffic Sources, which shows the percentage of your visitors coming from:

• Search Engines
• Referring sites (sites that link to yours)
• Direct traffic (people going directly to one of your urls)

On the right in this row is the Content Overview which shows your most-visited pages. If you see a line with just a slash, that is your homepage, as is a line that shows simply “/index.html”.