How to Google Analytics – The ultimate tool for every website

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful web analytics tool available for all websites. The fact that it’s an entirely free tool, and integrates with other Google programs, like AdWords, AdSense only makes it much more valuable. Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking traffic patterns on any website.

Google Analytics Quick in short

Before we begin, there a few terms you should know. You’ll see them often in your Google Analytics data, and I’ll use them throughout this post.

• Metrics—Metrics are individual elements of a dimension that can be measured as a sum or a ratio. Screenviews, Pages/Session, and Average Session Duration are examples of metrics in Google Analytics.
• Dimensions—A 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.
• 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 (Screenviews, Events, E-commerce, 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.
• Pageviews—Pageviews means the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
• Pages/Session—Pages/session (Average Page Depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
• Goals—Goals let you measure how often users take or complete specific actions on your website.
• 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 sitefrom the entrance page without interacting with the page).
• Behavior—Behavior data helps you improve your content.
• New Sessions—An estimate of the percentage of first-time visits.
• 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.

 

Google Analytics Dashboards

Dashboards allows you to create customized views of your Google Analytics data using the widgets. It’s a great way to view specific subsets of information or data without having to navigate through the reports. Here is a sample of a  Google analytics dashboard

You can also add custom widgets to your dashboards using the + “Add Widget” button. You can also download ready-to-go dashboards in the Google Analytics dashboard Gallery.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts are simply the links to your favorite Google Analytics reports. You can use Google Analytics shortcuts to quickly find data.

Whenever you are looking for a specific piece of data in Analytics that you want or you need to visit again, click on the Shortcut link above it. This places it in your Shortcuts menu for future assistance.

Intelligence Events

Intelligence Events are the alerts that you can set up within Google Analytics that emails you when a specific event happens.

You can set up alerts for events like a new or sudden change in number of sessions, goal conversions or other metrics within a day or even weekly or monthly time frame.

Real-Time

Want to know who is seeing your website right now? Real-Time data gives you access to that data always instantly. You can easily know how many people are seeing you site on real time now.You can see current visitors, page views, active pages, locations and more. It’s very important tool to know the instant details of your visitors.

 

Audience Through Conversions Reports

The main thing of your Google Analytics data will be found in the Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions sections. It gives you the in-depth reports on your users, traffic sources, content and goal completions.