Google Analytics - A Stilton Studios Quick Guide

A brief guide to understanding what each category does and how to read and apply the data effectively.

CONTENT:

Overview: This is a report to show pageview volume and lists the pages (Top Content) that were most responsible for driving pageviews. You can also reach some useful reports that reveal how users interact with your site and statistics related to how they found your site in the first place.

Top Content: Top Content is the most commonly viewed pages on your site, and how are they used?

Content by Title: Which are the most commonly viewed groups of pages on your site (grouped by title), and how are they used?

Content Drilldown: Content Drilldown shows how popular each page on your site is and how important the page is to your business. This report displays content into the folder structure set up on your website.

Top Landing Pages: Top Landing Pages displays which of your landing pages are the most effective at enticing visitors to your site and keeping them there.

Top Exit Pages: Top Exit Pages displays which pages people exit your site from.

Site Overlay: Site overlay allows you to navigate your site just as a visitor does, while viewing clicks, conversions, and revenue metrics for each link.

VISITORS:

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a service that lets you see how your website’s statistics compare against other similar businesses within your niche. Use benchmarking data to gain broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

Map Overlay
A geographical map displays visitors to your site from which city, country/territory, sub continent region or continent.

New Vs Returning
The percentage of new visitors is compared with those that are returning to your site.

Languages
Displays the languages visitors prefer to use and those that are configured on their computers.

VISITOR TRENDING:

Visits
Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site.

Absolute Unique Visitors
This represents the amount of individual people that visited, not visits.

Pageviews
A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code.

Unique Pageviews
A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

Average Pageviews
On average the amount of pages viewed on your site. The higher the pageviews the better as this represents website content that is useful to users.

Time on Site
The amount of time a visitor spends on your website. The longer duration the better, as visitors find your content useful.

Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

VISITOR LOYALTY:

Loyalty
Displays how often the same users come back to visit your site. High numbers of multiple visits means your site is proving useful. A high number of new visitors means your site is doing well to recruit new visitors.

Regency
The frequency of visitors keep coming back to your site. New visitors are displayed at the top whilst results are displayed depending on how many days have passed since the users last visit.

Length of Visit
How long visitors spend on your site. Long visits suggest that users find the quality of your content useful.

Depth of Visit
How many pages people are visiting in a sitting, compared to average page views. A large number of pages viewed in one go suggests visitors are largely interacting with your site.

TRAFFIC SOURCES:

Direct Traffic
Displays the direct url from which users clicked to find your site, either from a bookmark or a direct URL typed in to their browser.

Referring Sites
A referring site is a site that has a link to your website and this lists how users have found your website from that particular site.

Search Engines
Lists the Search Engines users have found your site with.

All Traffic Sources
This lists all the sources of traffic your website receives. The ‘Source’ is from where the traffic came and the ‘Medium’ is how, such as a referral.

Keywords
Keywords lists all the words that users have typed in to search engines to find your website or particular web pages.

ADWORDS:

Adwords is Google’s advertising system which serves text ads related to search terms and returns revenue in exchange for clicks.

Adwords Campaigns
An ad campaign focuses on one particular subject. You can have multiple ads tied to that campaign but the campaign itself is focused on a single topic. An ‘ad group’ is simply the collection of ads that are placed into a particular campaign.

Keywords Positions
This tells you what keywords are the most successful in relation to the position on the page of Google.

Audio Campaigns
To be able to compare data on your Audio Ad Campaigns.

TV Campaigns
To be able to compare data on your Google TV Ad Campaigns.

Campaigns
Campaigns listed that use Adwords. You can have multiple campaigns for different Adwords.

Ad Versions
This enables you to keep track of your Adwords Ads so see which copy is most effective in your Adwords campaigns.

GOALS:

A goal is a website page which a visitor reaches once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download.

LINKS TO FURTHER INFORMATION:

Google Analytics Search and Help:

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/?hl=en

Google Analytics Official Blog:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/04/using-google-analytics-with-website.html