Google Analytics Guide for Beginners in Depth

If you own a website and want to know its performance about visitors and their actions, there is a very popular tool called Google Analytics which will help you in this. If you are not using it on your website, or have installed it but never look at Google analytics Dashboard, then this post is for you. In this post, I am going to explain Google Analytics from the beginner’s point of view. Google Analytics Guide for beginners in depth will give you an idea of different types of metrics and their uses.

Why you need Google Analytics

Do you have a blog?

 Do you have a website?

If the answer is yes, whether they are for personal or business use, then you definately need Google Analytics. Lets see what Google Analytics can do for you about your website-

1. How many visitors visit your website?
2. How many visitors are visiting my website right now?
3. From where they are coming to my website?
4. What blog content do my visitors like the most?
5. What type of devices they are using?
6. Which pages on the website are the most popular?
7. How many visitors have I converted into customers?
8. How much time visitors spend on my website?
9. On which page visitors are landing and exiting off?
10. How can I improve my website’s speed?

There are many, many additional questions that Google Analytics can answer, but these are the ones that are most important for most website owners. Now let’s look at how you can get Google Analytics on your website.

Once you have a Google account, you can go to Google Analytics and click the Sign into Google Analytics button. You will then be greeted with the three steps you must take to set up Google Analytics.

You can login/signup to your Google Analytics account by clicking here

Once you start getting data in Google Analytics, you can get information about your website traffic. Once you log in to Google Analytics, you will be taken to your Audience Overview report. Alternatively, if you own more than one website, you will be taken to your list of websites to choose from, and then taken to the Audience Overview report for that website. You can also access these reports by clicking on the Reporting link at the top

Once you login to your Google Analytics account, you will see the Home page that first appears. On the homepage, you can see the overview of your website. It will show the total no of users, sessions bounce rate, Activers users. It also shows from where the users are acquired from and from where they are visiting the website. You can see what do your users visit and what devices they are using to visit your website.

There is more than 50 reports available that you can access from your google analytics dashboard and create any report at instant.

Lets see different types of Google Analytics reports in detail-

1. Realtime reports in Google Analytics

It will give you the live statistics of your website i.e statistics of the people who are visint your website at the time you are seeing Google Analytics Dashboard. In real time there are six sub-menus

Overview

Here you will find out

How many people are visiting your website right now

Top Active pages that live audiences are visiting and

The top locations from where they are visiting

Location

It will show you in-depth location details of all the users who are live right now. You will be able to see geographical map where you can see traffic by color circles. Once you hover over that, you will see that no of visitor from particular location.

Traffic Source

It will show you from where you are getting visitor. Either these are direct traffic or Paid traffic or both and how many and their percentage from traffic sources.

Content

It will show you the content that live audiences are visiting right now. You will see a list of posts that visitors are visiting.

Event

For this you have to set your Goals.

Conversions

For this you have to set your Goals.

2. Audience reports in Google Analytics

This is the most important report for you to understand your visitors and their actions.

Overview

It shows daily users coming to your website. It will show you number of users, New users, sessions, number of sessions per user, Pageviews, Pages per session, avergae session duration and bounce rate. Lets see these terms one by one.

Users

It is the total numbers of people visiting your website. Users are counted on a 24 hours basis. So if in a single day you visit same website multiple times, you will be counted as only one user.

Sessions

Sessions is generally a duration of 30 minutes. So if a visitor is staying on your website more than 30 minutes is called one session. Therefore a session is counted as a unique session if user visits more than 30 minutes on your website.

Number of sessions per user

It gives detail of average number of sessions per user. You can get this data by dividing total number of sessions and total numbers of users.

Page Views

Page views is the total number of pages viewed in overall session by total users. Repeated pageviews of a single page is also counted as a page views.

Page per session

It is the average number of pages views during a session. You can get this data by divinding total no of pageviews by total number of sessions.

Average session Duration

It gives average duration of a session, that means how much average time an user is spending on your website or staying on your website.

Bounce Rate

It shows how much time user stays on your website page I.e Time between landing on to your website page and taking off from that.

If bounce rate is high that means your content is not useful to the visitors, and if bounce rate is low, your content is engaging and taking attention of the visitors.

Active Users

It shows the number of unique users who initiated sessions on your website over a particular period of time. In report you can get active users for 1Day,7Day, 14 Day and 28 Day.

Lifetime Value

If your are selling some product on your website then you will see the life time value of the acquired customers. Lifetime value report gives you analsis of users who have made purchase from your website. You will get to know how valuable users are to your business based on Lifetime performance.

Cohort Analysis

Cohort means group of people with shared/common characteristics. So, cohort analysis gives you power to find out similar type of visitors rather than looking for total user together and by analysing it breaks them into related group and provides the details of their behaviour.

Audiences

To see the data in audiences report, we have to first Enable Demographics and interest by clicking on Enable in Audiences tab and Publish audiences to analytics

So, you have to create the Audience and publish it to analytics then you will be able to get data from the published date. It may take 24 hours to show to you data after you published.

User Explorer

It will give you the details of your goal achieved as set by you prior with the details of total number of Sessions, Average session duration, Bounce rate, Revenue generated, number of Transactions and Goal conversion rate

Demographics

It will give you the report of Age and gender of the population visiting your website.

Overview

You will be able to see total number of users and their age and gender group.

Age

Here you will see in depth report of users age brackets by getting the user data of Acquisition. Behaviour, and Conversions.

Gender

In depth details of Acquisition. Behaviour, and Conversions on the basis of users gender

Geo

Based on the geographical region for segmentation, this will give you details of users Language and Location.

Language

This report will give data of Top languages spoken by your users and the details of their acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions.

Location

This report will give data of Top locations of your users coming from and the details of their acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions.

Behaviour

Report on the behaviour of users on your website.

New vs Returning

Here, we will get the details of Acquisition, Behaviour and conversions of users based on New Users and Returning Users in a selected period of time.

Frequency and Recency

Frequency refers to how often visitor returns back to your website within a particular time period.

Google is recording Sessions on a specific device. If a user came to your website five times in one week, Google would view and record those visits individually. One would be a “first session,” one would be a “second session,” and so on. Google don’t merge all the sessions and say 5 times visitor but Google records five separate data points. 

“Count of sessions” gives you the users Frequency report.

Recency refers to the length of time since a specific visitor last visits to your website. Recency is measured in days. It used to track users device by which they are visiting your website. So, in a week if same visitor once visit your website by using mobile and on another day by using laptop then user would be recorded twice.

“Days since last session” gives you the users Recency report.

Engagement

This report measures the distribution of user interaction with your website. In Distribution tab, you will get two reports.

Session Duration Bucket

It shows the session of a user’s continued activity on your website. The length of session is measured in seconds.

Page Depth

Page depth is the measurement of the total number of pages on your website that a user  views during a browser session.

The reports is generated on the basis of histogram of pages 1-20+ and user session. These together gives the pages views per session.

Eg. If 100 user visits your site and in that only 30 went to 2^nd page and only 5 went to 3^rd page, Then your report might shows that 100 users visit only 1^st page 30 users only visited to 2^nd page and 5 users only visited to 3^rd page.

Technology

It gives you the details of device setting through which users are visiting your website and what type of internet networks they are are using. It will give you report of

Browser & OS

Browser type such as chrome, firefox etc, Operating sytems such as windows, mac, linux etc, Screen resolutions, screen colors Flash and Java

Network

You will get the users inernet service provider details.

By using both the data you can optimize your content for particular devices from where you are getting more conversions or visitors.

Mobile

 In this report you will get details of devices visitor are using such as Desktop, tablet or mobile, device brands, and service provider to that devices etc.

3. Acquisition reports in Google Analytics

Acquisition gives the details of how you are acquiring or gaining the customers and what are the different mediums to get them.

All Traffic

It will give details of all the visitors coming to your website from different sources I.e direct traffic, paid traffic, organic traffic, mediums and referrals. It will also show you the treemaps of the performance of your content and campaigns(in campaigns section).

A treemap is a visualization of the performance with different metrics. Blocks are used to represent a hierarchy of data that is called tree. Each block represents a branch of the tree and contains smaller blocks that represent sub-branches. The relative sizes and colors of the blocks represent the relative values of the selected metrics.

The report can be interpreted as:

• The larger the block, the larger the proportion of sessions for that Channel
•  Long session are shown in shades of green color. Darker the green color, longer the session.
• Small session are shown in shades of red. Darker the red,lower the session.

Google Ads

If you are running google ads to get traffic or leads, here you will find the report of campaign performance, Keywords for which you appears in search engine, queries search people are doing etc. In goolgle ads also you will get the visual report in the form of treemaps.

Search console

In search console you will get report of searches for that your website contents are appearing.

Landing page give the details of pages on which visitors are landing mostly.

Countries will give the details of visitors list countrywise.

Devices will show whether visitora are coming from mobile or desktop.

Queries will give the details of queries search by visitors for which they are landing on your website.

Social

Overview will give you details of social refferals from different social platforms once you setup the goals for it.

Network refferals will show total users and sessions from the social platforms.

Landing Page will show you the page to which visitors are coming from social platforms.

Conversions will show you total leads or sells of your product from social media platforms.

Plugins will show you the urls that are shared on social paltforms.

User Flow will give you details of page visitors are coming to your website from socila media and from where exiting-off

Campaigns

It will show you Acquisition behaviour and conversions of all google ads campaigns, paid keywords, organic keywords and cost analysis of the campaign per conversion. You can compare channels, keywords and campaigns in cost analysis report.

4. Behaviour reports in Google Analytics

Behaviour will show you detailed report of how visitors are coming to your website, what content they are consuming and from which page they are exiting from the website.

Site Content

Content drill down

This report help you to see how many page views a URL gets, the bounce rate, the exit rate, and the time spent on the page. This report can help you see if there are sections on your site that are working.

All pages

It will show the pages visited by the visitors to your website.

Landing pages

These are pages through which visitors are entering your website.

Exit pages

These are pages through which visitors are leaving your website.

Site speed

It will give you details of how much time your website take to load once visitors click on website url. Average page load time will be measured in seconds.

Page timings will show the average page load time of particular pages of your website.

Speed suggestions will give report of average page load time, Page speed score and suggestions to improve the load time. It will help to enhance better user experience.

User timings

The User Timings report will give you detailed analysis of individual resource performance, for example images, videos, buttons etc.

Site Search

It will report you the details of sessions by user on your website for their searches.

Usage will give report of visits that are internal site search and that do not.

Search Terms will show you the serches for which visitors are coming to your websites.

Search Pages will show the page of your website by which visitors searched your website.

5. Conversions reports in Google Analytics

Conversion report will be showed to you once you setup your goals for lead or sales of your products and services.

If you set up Goals within your Google Analytics, you can see how many conversions your website has received and on what URLs you received the conversions.. You can also see the path that visitors took to complete the conversion.

Once you’ve installed Google Analytics on your website, set up your goals, and set up site search, you should wait about 24 hours for it to start getting data. Then you will be able to start viewing your data.

Learn in more detail about Google Analytics and watch the video to clear the understanding. Learn more about why Google Ads is important for your business.

Read this article to understand the fundamentals of Digital Marketing. and the Concepts Digital Marketers should know.

Read this article to know SEO in brief. If you are interested to learn Digital Marketing Read this

Thank you for reading this. Please give your feedback/suggestion if any !