Google Analytics Basics

Understanding who is using your website and when is critical to assessing the success of campaigns, content, and other marketing strategies. Google Analytics offers a robust feature set (for free) to help you collect and interpret this type of data, but its reports aren't entirely intuitive if you've never worked in analytics before. To make the most out of a Google Analytics report, you'll first need to learn to read it.

How To Read A Google Analytics Report

Once you've installed Google's tracker on each page of your website, you'll begin comprehensive data about your web traffic. This information is presented in distinct sections with interactive visuals. Important to note is that on each report, you can change the date range at upper right to help you see precise trends.

Audience Overview
The first page you'll see upon loading your dashboard is an overview of your audience and web traffic, which is where you'll get many of the big-picture insights you need. This report describes important numbers like page views, distinct visitors, and demographics.

Key Audience Subsections
The audience reports section more broadly contains 15 subsections. Some to pay attention to include:
• Demographics (who is accessing your website?)
• System (how are people accessing your website?)
• Lifetime Value (what happens over time once someone has visited your page once?)

Other Main Sections
There are three other broad report types available in the left sidebar. These are:
• Acquisition, which tells you where your web traffic is coming from.
• Behavior, which tells you what users do once they land on your website
• Conversion, which gives you the specifics about whether and how visitors are actually becoming paid consumers. This section is especially important because it allows you to define goals and assess progress toward them.

Speak With an Expert
If making sense of a Google Analytics report is tough, gleaning actionable insights from these reports are tougher but far more important. Talk to our experts at Neon Rain Interactive today to learn how we can help make your content engaging, effective, and SEO-optimized.