Content Overview

• The Content Overview once again shows your total pageviews, unique views, and bounce rate. It also shows what pages are the most popular on your site
• Top Content gives more information about your most popular content, breaking down how many pageviews and unique views each page has received, as well as average time on page, bounce rate, and % exit. Content by Title and Content Drilldown list the same information in different formats.
• Top Landing Pages shows which pages most people entered the site from. For example, if a website linked to an article on your website, and a lot of people visited that page, that particular page would be high on the top landing pages because a lot of people entered the website from that page.
• Top Exit Pages is another extremely informative page. It shows which pages most people exited the website from. This tells you what content is losing interest and what pages are particularly engaging.
• Site Overlay allows you to look at your page with an overlay created by Google Analytics on top of it. It shows you what links clicked and more.

Top Exit Pages

By using the information found in the Content section of Google Analytics, it is possible to learn how visitors interact with your site and what they find the most and least engaging, allowing you to tailor your site to make it more interesting to your readers.

After you enter your Google Analytics account, click on the visitors link on the left sidebar of the page. The first page you reach, the visitors overview page, presents a fairly robust way of learning about the visitors to your page. Like the main overview, the visitors overview shows you how many users have accessed your site and can be sorted by day, week, and month. It also has a number of other options which help you understand how your site is being used.

Visitor Statistics

• Visits is the number of visitors your site has received. Each time a visitor enters your site, this is increased. It is different from pageviews because it only shows each time a person enters your site for the first time.
• Absolute Unique Visitors shows how many unique IP addresses (an identification number every internet connection has) have reached your site. This doesn’t include returning visitors and can be used to show how many new vs. repeat visitors your site receives.
• Pageviews is how many pages of your website have been viewed. This number is increased each time that a visitor views a different page in your website.
• Average Pageviews is the average number of pages a user looks at per visit on the site. This can be used with time on site to see how long people stay on your site.
• Time On Site shows how long the average user spends on your site. This can range from seconds to minutes to hours, and can be used with average pageviews to see how people spend their time on your site.
• Bounce Rates are extremely informative. A “bounce” is when a visitor views a single page of your site and then continues on to a different site. You want this to be as low as possible in order to maximize how long and how many pages a visitor views.
• New Visits shows the percentage how many absolutely new visitors are entering your site. This is different from unique visits because while unique visitors just shows how many different IPs have visited your site in the selected time frame, new visits only counts how many people have viewed your site for the first time.

Google Analytics offers even more information about how people use your site if you click further into the ‘visitors’ submenu.

• Benchmarking compares your site statistics to other sites your size. It is useful to compare various data Google Analytics collects to other sites.
• Map Overlay is useful because it tells you where your visitor is located. You can sort by country and drill down further into viewing by State. If you run a business, you might want to see where your products are most popular, or if you get a lot of visitors from another country, you might want to add another language localization to your site.
• New vs. Returning adds further functionality to the data on the visitor overview, displaying a pie graph comparing new vs returning visitors and giving more ways to compare and view this information.
• Languages tells you what languages the computer that visits you is operating in. While this data is useful, it has to be taken with a grain of salt because many computers are set to English by default and never changed.
• Visitor Trending displays the same data as presented on the Visitor Overview page, but sorts it by day in an easy to read bar graph.
• Visitor Loyalty shows how many users return to your site and how many times they do so. It presents the data in an easy to read line graph sorted by number of times visited. This can be used to tell how many times the average user visits your site. It also shows visit recency, presenting a line graph of the relative amounts of visitors per day. Similar presentation can be found for length of visit and depth of visit, which shows how many pages on a site your visitors viewed.
• Browser Capabilities is useful because it shows the various browsers, operating systems, and computer information that your readers are using. This is important to web developers because all browsers display websites differently. Knowing the most popular browser, OS, and other computer information for your website allows us at Pica to design a better user experience for your visitors.
• Network Location is interesting, but not incredibly useful. You can learn what internet service providers your visitors are using, and their connection speed. This can be useful for web designers.
• User Defined allows you to view custom reports for your website. However, Google Analytics already displays so many statistics that it is rare that custom statistics are necessary.

New vs. Returning

The overview page contains the following:

• A pie chart showing where your traffic comes from. There are three possible sources:
  • Direct Traffic is when a visitor types your website address directly into the address bar.
  • Referring Sites occur when a site links to yours and shows how much traffic your site is receiving from links on other sites.
  • Search Engine shows what percentage of your traffic is coming from search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
• Top Traffic Sources shows exactly where your traffic is coming from, whether it be direct, referring sites, or through a search engine. It will also say what websites are linking to you and the keywords that people used to find your website on search engines.

Traffic Sources Overview

Google Analytics filters this information even further, giving you more information about each of these sources.

• Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, and All Traffic Sources all give you more information on how people coming from each of these sources interact with your site, such as average time on the website from each, bounce rate, and more.
• AdWords is exceptionally useful if you run an AdWords campaign on Google. It tells you how much traffic you are getting from your Ads, how long they spend on your site, and the bounce rate all of which helps you target and refine your campaign.
• Keywords gives you more info on what terms people are using to find your website on search engines and how they spend time on your site.
• Campaigns shows very specific info about your ad campaigns individually, you can track separate campaigns, see their convergence rates, and more.
• Ad Versions allows you to compare different versions of ads to see which ones are more effective. By doing this you can find which ads give you the most traffic, convince the user to stay longest on the site, and find which have the lowest bounce rates in order to tailor your ad campaign.

All Traffic Sources

Pica Design will gladly set up a Google Analytics account for our clients, and that’s the hardest part of the whole ordeal (and all this really takes is a line of code on the bottom of your website).

Next you just have to log in to your Google Analytics Dashboard.

Google Analytics Dashboard

This may seem like a lot of information, but when broken down it is easy to see how useful Google Analytics is. It shows you visits to your site per day, week, or month, and makes detailed charts which yield a lot of data. It also shows information like total visits, how many unique visitors have browsed the site, how long they spend on the site, how people are finding your sites, and even where they are located!

The sidebar of Google Analytics contains links to even more detailed info. Browser statistics and screen size can be found (which is particularly relevant to us designers), as well as Search Engine Optimization data, such as what people are searching on Google to find your website and what pages are attracting the most attention.

Google Analytics is a great tool for any website. Not only does it offer detailed data on the use of your site, but it also can help you build a site more compelling for the user.