Here’s the Google Analytics 101 you’ve been looking for -

If you’re a marketer who already recognizes the importance of analytics and what a great tool Google analytics can be for measuring results for your website, but still struggling to know how to use the tool, then I’ve made you this ultimate 101.

Without beating around the bush, here are the key reports available in Google Analytics. I’ll cover what each section is about.

Let’s get started.

Google Analytics has the following reports at your disposal:

Let’s cover what they’re about one-by-one. I’ll be using Google Analytics’ demo account from their Google Merchandise store to show you what each feature and reports look like. Feel free to play around the demo account and discover the kind of treasures you can take home from it!

Realtime reports

This is an overview of the Realtime report, which shows you how many people are on your website on – wait for it – real time.

By looking into the real-time report, you will see the following:

How many active users are on your website right now (in this case 32) and the breakdown of devices that they are using.
The pages that they are currently looking at, arranged in the order of what your active users have all browsed the most. Naturally, the home page appears to be the most browsed as most people may have landed on your home page first before clicking anything else from it.
How long they are spending by page, with a breakdown on per minute and per second basis.
Where they come from geographically, if you click on locations

Where they spent their time on the web before landing on your website (traffic sources)

Which pages they’re on right now (content)

Events, or user interactions with content that can be measured independently from a web-page or screen load. Downloads, link clicks, form submissions, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to analyze as Events.

And finally, the conversions. How many users performed the actions that you want them to take?

While the real-time reports can serve as a rich source of data and information about what your visitors are doing on your website, it is important to note that it should NOT be the main basis for making decisions about tweaking your website and making it conversion-friendly.

The ultimate goal of real-time reports is for TESTING. This is used by conversion optimizers and anyone doing tests on your websites to find out if things are working the way they’re supposed to, that goals are tracking, and that your Google Analytics is properly set up (and if not, where the issues potentially may be coming from.)

Audience

The audience report answers the question: WHO?

It provides you so much information about the profile of your website visitor and how they’re behaving within your website. Let’s have a look at the overview and dashboard:

If you’re the type of marketer who can be so obsessed about the customer persona and the profile of the target audience, then you can be a kid in a candy store with this report. Just take a look at all the various information you can find about your visitors here:

With all these information available, the Audience reports can give you insights on who your users are. While there are no personal details given (visitors come in the form of client IDs – not their names or emails silly), you can zoom in and be granular about your audience’s profile – where they live, their age, gender, languages, the devices they use, and so much more.

Play around the Google Analytics demo account (or your own if you have one) and have a look at the following:

Their demographics

What their interests are – this tells you what other things they’re interested in and how you can better communicate and appeal to them

Geography and where most of your audiences come from

Their behaviour in your website

The devices and browsers that they use, i.e. mobile vs desktop vs tablet and Safari vs Chrome (this will help you optimize your website across different devices later on)

Acquisition

This report answers the question: WHERE DO THEY COME FROM?

Acquisition report tells you how you have “acquired” your visitors – which part of the interwebs they visited before they found you (or if they went straight to your website and know your URL by heart).

Here you can get specific details on where your users are coming from, what “Source” and Medium” they used.

There are also two things to note here:

Google ads – if you have run or planning to run ads on Google, you need to link your Google Ads account into your Analytics account. This is incredibly important as doing so will provide insights and information about what kinds of ads your users clicked to get into your website.

Google Search Console – gives you information on organic traffic and how your users landed on your website – not through ads – but through your keywords and other organic sources.

Behaviour

The Behavior report answers the question: HOW?

How do your website visitors behave within your website? What pages do they go to and frequent? Just take a look at this:

With this snapshot you can tell which pages have the most traffic, how long they spend on a page, and even the value of the page if you’re an e-Commerce site.

My favorite part of the Behavior report though is this:

Behavior flow lets you see how your visitors flow, as well as the % of dropouts from one page to another. Is there a massive dropout? If so, what does it say about how easy it is to navigate a certain page or the content within it? This information is key in optimizing your website and making sure that it is user-friendly enough to keep your customers until they get to your transaction pages.

Conversion

This report answers the million-dollar question: WHAT ARE THE RESULTS OF ALL OF MY USER’S ACTIONS?

In this report, you will be able to find out:

where the goals are being achieved from the goals report
the path that led to that achievement
specific ideas of the actual steps that were required to achieve it
Through the funnel visualization report, the flow of people and how they actually flow through and loop back, and skip around steps in the flow reports. This shows when they tend to go back to a certain page, which may be an indication that a previous page doesn’t have the information that they need to proceed to the next one. Or that maybe an Add to Cart page encourages them to go back to the previous page and shop for more.
In the eCommerce report, you will see two different styles of eCommerce – the enhanced e-Commerce with all the shopping behavior and checkout behavior, how the sale was made, how the product was bought. In the standard eCommerce reports, what the products are and which ones resulted in sales
Multi-channel reports provide information on how the different traffic sources are working together and which ones are assisting in conversions. Which ones are actually causing traffic before the conversion itself?

Hope you enjoyed this article!

I suggest you play around and get yourself familiar with Google Analytics using Google Analytics’ demo account from their Google Merchandise store. Feel free to tinker around, explore what each of the reports does and get some insights about the numbers and graphs. It may look overwhelming at first, but just keep exploring it and you’ll eventually get the hang of it. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. You can also email me@tinasendin.com or connect with me on LinkedIn!

Here’s the Google Analytics 101 you’ve been looking for

Realtime reports

Audience

Acquisition

Behaviour

Conversion

Hope you enjoyed this article!

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