Google Analytics Tutorial for Beginners

Google Analytics is installed on more than 10 million websites.  68+ percent of the top US retailers, more than 55 percent of Fortune 500 businesses, and 65 percent of the top 1 million domains listed by Alexa use it. All these metrics combine to give Google Analytics a market share of more than 82 percent on the web analytics platform!

These stats show how much people in the industry love Google Analytics to track the performance of their websites. There are several reasons behind this. The main reason is that this tool is totally free and provides all the information needed for your business to make a proper handful of decisions.

Google Analytics helps us in many ways starting with insights into how users find and use your websites, it also provides in-depth information like Where they come from, what browser they are using, age, gender, interest, location, etc., and how they clicked on what page and what form they submitted.  You can also create your own defined Goals and events which can be tracked easily after completed by visitors.

For websites that deal with eCommerce, Google Analytics helps to understand what are the pages users visited before completing a purchase. We can also integrate other Google tools like your ads account and Google Search Console data (for keywords performance) which make analysis very easy and comfortable by providing every data on a single platform. You can also create your own report by combining the needed dimension and metrics 

Now you might be thinking that whether you need Google Analytics for your website or not, so let me tell you that there are no such websites that can improve without digital analysis whether it is related to eCommerce, blogging, education, etc. Whether they are for personal or business use, every website needs Google Analytics. 

I am going to take you, readers, on a fully-fledged tour of Google Analytics, starting from its installation to giving meaningful insights of each and every metric which will aid you in analyzing your website performance and making better business decisions.

Why you Need Google Analytics

There are endless points which can explain why you need Google Analytics:

• By observing your visitor’s actions, you can build your highly engaging audience that is showing interest, and furthermore you can perform remarketing for them.
• eCommerce businesses can use Google Analytics to understand customers’ online purchasing behavior and make changes in marketing their products and services accordingly.
• Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with potential leads.
• It also displays your website’s scope for various devices that will help you determine whether you need a mobile-friendly website or not.

There are several more points that can explain the need for Google Analytics, but as a beginner, after reading other articles, you can get confused. So I will leave it to you to explore and understand why you need Google Analytics for your website. For that, you need to install it on your website so let’s move forward and install Google Analytics.

Note *If you have already installed this, you can move straight to the next phase, but do not forget to check the basic objectives, segments, and filters to be set up to obtain the relevant data.

1: How to Install Google Analytics

Before starting this, I need to tell you some very important points so that you should not face any issues in the future. For setting up Google Analytics, you need to have a Google account which you are going to use for a long period of time. It can be your personal account or business account depending on your requirement.

1.1: Set up an account

• Scenario 1: Already have a Google Analytics account access on your Google account

This scenario happens when you already have a Google Analytics account created in the past, or you work in an organization and have access to other Google Analytics accounts.

In this case, go to the admin section and start creating a new account by clicking on the blue button that creates an account (you can check in the image below).

• Scenario 2: if you are starting with a new one then type Google Analytics in the search engine and click the first result which will take you to this page(in the image below) where you have to click on sign up for free.

In both cases (scenario 1 and 2), you will get the same page where you have to start creating your account 

Mention your account name, it can be your business name or website name, anything which you can easily understand. After that, scroll down and click on the next step.

Select what you want to measure at the starting stage. As a beginner, I am going with the “website” option. Select the first option, and click on the next step.

This is the last stage of setting up an account. Here there are a couple of the sections where you need to focus.

Like in the section where you have to type your website URL, normally you just copy and paste your URL but do not copy the whole URL including https because that is already mentioned there and there is also an option to select the protocol. So if your site is on https, then you can change the protocol. 

Secondly, you should understand your industry category properly because Google Analytics also provides a benchmark performance report of the business related to your industry, so make sure you are selecting a proper industry category.   

After clicking on the create option, you will get a popup of the Google Analytics terms and conditions, which you have to agree to. Then you will get your Google Analytics tracking code.

1.2: Install tracking code

This is a tracking script that you need to copy and paste on the head section of every page of your website. There are different ways of installing this script for different platforms so if your website is on WordPress you can follow these steps-

1. Go to your admin panel from the side navigation bar. Click on appearance and then select editor.

  2. You will then in the theme editor section, now on the side you can see the theme files where you have to find Theme Header file because that is available on each page of your website. Click on that and paste your script just below the opening head tab and click on the update.

PRO TIP* There are other techniques of doing this process if you are not familiar with coding you can use a WordPress plugin or you can use Google Tag Manager also.Many times users paste the code but how will you check that the script is properly pasted or not, for this there is a perfect solution which is a chrome extension called Google Tag Assistant, Tag Assistant helps to troubleshoot installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more.

Tag Assistant helps you verify that you have installed various Google tags correctly on your page. Just navigate to any page and Tag Assistant will tell you which tags are present, report any errors we find, and suggest improvements that can be made to your implementation. Most Google tags are checked including Google Analytics, Adwords Conversion Tracking, Google Tag Manager, and more.Use Google Tag Assistant Recording to record a typical user flow to and through your website and instantly validate, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues with your Google Analytics implementation”. 

After you’ve successfully pasted the script, go back to Google Analytics where you’ll see a dashboard as seen in the picture below, now you may wonder about the three boxes I highlighted (Account, Property, and View). Before taking a step further, you should be very well aware of these sections so let’s first understand these sections then move to the next step. 

2: Understanding Basic Account Structure in Google Analytics

This is a very important section which you really need to understand before moving further because this is the section where you always have to come back again and again. I will explain the whole structure with the help of an example –

Let’s say you’re working in a company where you’re interacting with multiple businesses, which is an eCommerce website www.ecom.com and the next is www.blog.com you can build two separate accounts respectively. After creating accounts, a new property and view is automatically generated and accessed for the respected accounts, let’s now say for the eCommerce website you do have a subdomain named demo.ecom.com now for this you don’t need to create another account it can be managed by creating a new property within the same account of (while creating a property you will get a script which you need to paste in you site head section) now you have two property for a single account (www.ecom.com) now for ecom.com website property you need two different views were in the first view named filtered view where you set up different filters so that you can get a filtered data for analysis and the second view can perform different testing stuff so you named that an unfiltered view. Now let me summarize.

In a single organization, you have created multiple accounts and for a single account you have created multiple properties and for a single property, you have created multiple views. Things will get more clear in the image below.

2.1: Filters Section

Views use Filters in Google Analytics to segment the data into smaller groups. Filters may be used to include only certain traffic subsets, exclude undesirable data, or to scan and delete certain pieces of information.

Before starting let me clear some basic misunderstanding related to filters in Google Analytics. 

In the image you can see that there are two filters in the account section and in the view section, you might get confused where it is right to apply. Account section filters will apply on all the properties and views related to that account but the best way to apply a filter is in the view section so that only that particular view gets filtered instead of all the properties and views. 

PRO TIP* Make a practice of creating a minimum of 2 views that are filtered and unfiltered. In filtered view, all the filter which requires to generate proper relevant data for analysis and the non-filtered view is just for testing purpose without any filters. Exclude your own data from Google Analytics with the help of filters.

2.1.1: How to exclude your own traffic from Google Analytics 

Filters are all about processing data, there are lots of different stuff that you can do with filters but for the basic practice and standard setup, let’s start by filtering our own traffic from Google Analytics data because you don’t want to analyze your own traffic which doesn’t make sense.

To exclude your own traffic from Google Analytics you can filter your IP address, let’s see how you can do that-

1. Click on the filter in the view section.
2. Then click on the add filter option
3. Type the name of the filter
4. Select filter type to custom
5. Select filter field to IP Address
6. Copy your IP address by typing my IP in a new tab and paste that in the box
7. Now you can click on save

For the confirmation, you can check in the real-time section by visiting your website, your data should not be reflected in real-time.

There are tons of basic and advanced level filtering options available and you are facing issues in applying them you can mention in the comment section. 

2.2: Goals Section

Before setting up a goal you should have a proper understanding of your website objective because, without that, you can’t think about setting up a goal. You should properly understand what steps a user is going to take while obtaining your site objectives. 

Goals measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business. Examples of goals include making a purchase (for an eCommerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).

2.2.1: How to set up a destination goal in Google Analytics(the most common one) 

Let’s set up a basic and very important goal which should be there for every site that is the destination goal. After setting up this goal, each time someone goes to that URL, they trigger the goal. These are ideal for thank you pages, confirmation pages, etc.

Suppose you have an e-commerce website where there is a thank you page that displays a “thank you” message every time after the user purchases a product. 

• From the view section select goal and then click on create a goal
• Type the name of your goal select the destination option in goal type
• Click on continue
  
• Copy and paste the destination URL of your website

Note*while entering the URL make sure to enter what comes after the domain. For example, if you want to track how many people land on your thank you page, and the URL for that looks like this www.test.com/thank-you/, only enter “/thank-you/”.

• For now, leave the section of goal value we will discuss this in detail
• Optionally, you can take advantage of using the funnel option to understand the user journey. Basically, goal funnels allow you to see exactly how many people move through your marketing process at every stage. At each stage, you’ll know how many people are leaving your funnel so you know which pages you need to repair. Create a targeted funnel for your eCommerce checkout, for example, to see how many customers pass between the shopping cart and the payment page through each stage.
• You can verify your goal by clicking on “verify this goal” but this will only work if you have past data in your Google Analytics account
• Save your goal

2.3: Basic Understanding of Interface

After completing all the basic setup processes lets move towards the next phase that is the Google Analytics interface where we will be discussing related to important concepts provided by Google Analytics. 

2.3.1: What are the dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics?

When you go further (in the reporting section), Google Analytics will give you various visualizations where you can get confused. Dimensions and metrics are one of those confusing points, most of the users who are using Google Analytics but don’t exactly understand the exact concept of Dimension and Metrics which make it hard when it comes to reporting or explaining stuff to the boss. So let’s understand this at a beginner’s level so that you should not face these problems.

Starting with Dimensions

Dimensions are the attributes or characteristics of the visitors visited your website. I know still, this is confusing so let’s start with an example- let’s say a user visited your website from organic search from India and he is 44 years from desktop and the browser he is using is chrome.   

Now, these are the attributes of that user for your website with the values-

• Source – organic search
• Country – India
• Age – 44
• Device – Desktop
• Browser – Chrome

Google Analytics marks these attributes as measurements. There are no metrics without dimensions since metrics are merely numbers that require dimensions to render their values. Moving on to metrics,

What are the metrics? 

Metrics are just numbers that are used to measure dimensions. These are the characteristics of the metrics –

• Users
• New users
• Bounce rate
• Sessions
• Page per sessions
• Transaction etc

Google Analytics marks these as metrics. My advice is to practice these two as much as you can because you will be dealing with them until you are connected with Google Analytics.

PRO TIP* “All the dimensions are highlighted in green and all the metrics are highlighted in Blue with making this more understandable”.

2.3.2: Home section

This is an interesting and very informative section of Google Analytics especially for beginners where they can easily understand the performance of their website without navigating the whole bunch of data present in different reporting sections of Google Analytics. 

Easy to Understand the context 

Most importantly, this dashboard describes every section in a simple and insightful way, as you can see in the picture, for example, every article is explained with a casual reader phrase – “How do you get users? “Were your users here? “When do you meet your users? “Which sites do you frequent with your users? “And much more.

Simple date control

By default, this report provides the last seven days data but you can change that by clicking on the small drop-down that appears at the left bottom of each report as you can see in the image above.

Link to expand insights 

By clicking on the link available at the right bottom side of every report section will take you to the more insights related to that report. 

2.4: Customization Section

Since the name itself describes what this section is about, as you can build your custom report, notifications according to your needs, but again you should have a clear understanding of Google Analytics reporting gems, but luckily Google Analytics experts took the time to develop models for the custom reports they consider most beneficial and make them accessible to everyone via the Solutions Gallery. 

I will explain each section of customization so that you can take full advantage of this. Let’s start with dashboards.

2.4.1: How to create custom dashboards

This seems like the home section somewhere just the difference that we have to create this manually.

Steps to create a custom report in Google Analytics  

Let’s create a basic custom report that will provide information about the different sources we are getting traffic.

• Click on a custom report in navigation section and then click on “new custom report”
• Choose a custom report tab– Each custom report from Google Analytics has one tab, but you can add more if you wish. We’ll stay with one tab for our example, and keep the default name Test Tab.
• Choose between three report types– you must be thinking what kinds of report types so let me elaborate on this.
  

  Explorer. This is the Google Analytics report which is standard. Which I will use, includes a line graph and a data table with flexible stuff along with an option for searching and sorting and secondary dimensions.

  Flat Table. This custom report is static and has a sortable table that shows data in rows.

  Map Overlay. This report type shows you a map of the world including regions and countries in darker colors when there is traffic or site engagement.

• Define the Custom Report Metrics- This layout will be different for different report types but the metrics and dimensions will always be the same. Select users from the metrics section and source/medium from dimension.
• Add a filter (Optional)-You can also add filters in this custom report like you can set to exclude traffic coming from any city or country. But as a beginner, we can leave that for now.
  
• Save the report

As you can see in the image above that this is how you built the dashboard. There is a lot more to do with custom dashboards than this. Only play with the data and find out more about Google Analytics.

If you want to view your Google Analytics custom reports in the future, just go to Customization » Custom Reports and click on the report you want to view.

2.4.1: How to setup custom alert

This is a fascinating set up in Google Analytics. Before any strange things like weird spikes or drops happen on your site, this warning tells you to set up and improve accordingly when setting up Google Analytics. Most people don’t take a serious look at it, but as my experience suggests, this is one of the most critical setups you should all take into consideration. 

Let me explain you with an example- assume you don’t have time to review data every day, visitors are unable to visit due to some technical problem on your site and after a week when you check your data, you have missed a lot of visitors and maybe this can be solved on day one if you set up a custom alert of daily visitors less than 1 or 2 and you got the mail and resolved immediately.

Steps  

• Click on customization > custom alert
• Then click on “Manage Custom Alert”
• After that click on “New Alert”
• Type the name and select all apply this to all views by clicking on “0 other views”.
• Now in alert condition select “This applies to” all traffic and “alert me when” to users less than 2 of 3.
• Save your filter.

Now, this alert will send you an email every time when your users are getting low in a day, without wasting time you can take accessions. There are a lot more alerts you can create according to your business requirement and take full use of this. 

3: Moving to the Reporting Section

We have got some basic knowledge of setting up Google Analytics so far and got some essential interface portions. Now you’ve got to feel confident working with this tool and may have started to get a little more comfortable.

Now we can move to the reporting section of Google Analytics where we will be dealing with the flow of data, different dimensions, and metrics, different graphs, and much more. Each section contains its subsections. We will discuss each and every section separately, so let’s start with the Realtime section.

3.1: Realtime Section

As the name explains, this section depicts what is happening to your website, the very movement like you can see how many visitors are on your website, on which page they have landed, what are the sources and media of there, what are their locations, etc.

There are some ways that can help you to take advantage of this realtime report 

• I basically use this for testing a lot, for example, you have created  a goal or event in Google Analytics and you want to test that they are working properly of not so you can cross-check that by testing that in real-time view (always create test view for testing)
• You can check the traffic of maybe your new blog or any of your pages which you have shared on any platform to understand what amount of traffic you can from that particular platform.

In the overview, you can see a combination of all subsections related to real-time like location, traffic source, content, events, etc which you can see individually by visiting each sub-report. 

3.2: Audience Section

From this section, you will start dealing with a bunch or collection of data. The audience section will provide you each and every information related to your visitors like  “Demographics,” “Interests,” “Geo,” “Behavior,” “Technology,” “Mobile,” “Cross-Device,” “Custom,” and “Benchmarking”.

Explore each of these sections to get a sense of what they can tell you about your visitors. 

PRO TIP* As you can see in the image above the line graph which helps you to understand what is the exact flow of traffic like on which day traffic gets low which day your site receives a high amount of audience”, this helps me in understanding which can be the perfect day for marketing like – running Ads, uploading blogs and more. 

Before moving deep into this, there are some metrics which are very important and you will be dealing with them on a frequent basis so let’s first understand them so that further points can be crystal clear to you –  

• Users – The Users metric shows you the number of users who visited your website within a particular time frame.
• Sessions – The Sessions metric shows you the number of interactions on your website over a particular time period.
  One session can include many pageviews and events, as well as e-commerce transactions. The duration of one session is 30 minutes by default but you can change that according to your website types. If a website visitor is engaged in a session on your website and continues more than 30 min then a new session will start so according to this one user can have more than one session.
• Pageviews – Pageview metrics show the number of page views for each page and every time its counting will increase if the page is loaded or the same user came back to that page again and again. Pageviews can be more than one for a single user but a unique pageview will only be one for a single user.
• Pages / Session – The Pages / Session metric shows you the average number of visited pages per session.
  For instance, if one website visitor visits five pages in a single session and another one visits 15 pages in one session, the Pages / Session metric will show 4.5 (5+15 / 2 = 10).
• Avg. Session Duration – Average Session Duration is not a metric that can provide you with a precise answer regarding the average time your visitors spend on your website.
  This is due to the fact that this metric is calculated by subtracting the duration of the last engagement on your website with the duration of the first engagement, without measuring the time duration on exit pages.
  For instance, if a visitor lands on a particular page on your website and stays there for 5 minutes before leaving it, the session duration would be 0 seconds. Therefore, this metric only indicates the average session duration, rather than giving you the exact data.
• Bounce Rate – The Bounce Rate metric shows you the percentage of website visitors who bounced back from your website. That means that they left your site immediately after landing on one of its pages, without navigating any further.

Let’s cover some important subsections of Audience 

3.2.1: Active Users

The Active Users report shows you the number of users who visited in the last day (1-day active users), week (7-day active users), two weeks (14-day active users), and four weeks (28-day active users.)You must be thinking that what is the need for this report, so let me tell you its basically for the analysis of retaining customers like if your website is not dealing with one day users then this report can be helpful. 
For instance, you can use segments of a different country or different cities (according to your business type) and analyze from which country the users are more active and which country you need to work on to make them active by checking single week active users or 4 weeks active users.

3.2.2: Lifetime value 

The Report on Lifetime Value gives you an idea of how important visitors are for your company. For example, the users you generated from organic search vs those that you acquired from social media, you can see their lifetime value. Using this information, you get to choose which channels to invest more. On a beginner stage, this section cant really helps because it requires data to evaluate but those dealing with data from a long time can take full advantage of this report. There will be a separate blog on each section of the report where I’ll be explaining in detail.

3.2.3: Cohort Analysis

Let’s start out by defining what a cohort is.
In simple terms, a cohort is a group of users who have a shared set of characteristics.
Although Google Analytics only offer the option to view cohorts by acquisition date There are four things you need to know about cohort analysis in Google Analytics:

• Cohort Type: The only option here is an acquisition date. This is what goes on the vertical axis.
• Cohort Size: How large should the cohorts be? Do you want to divide your cohorts into days, weeks, or months?
• Metric: This is the metric that is being measured for each cohort. This could be user retention, revenue, session duration, or any other metric you want to dive into.
• Date range: This is the time period you want to review your cohorts. This can either be days, weeks, or months, depending on what cohort size you have chosen.

I know the dashboard looks scary but no worries. You just need to segment and then understand. 

Starting from All Users section shows the percentage of users retained on each day except day one because that is from which retained visitors are compared,
so let’s say on Aug 25, the no. of visitors who came back on day one is 9.57%. This means that 9% of visitors are acquired between day 0 to day 1.

If you find any better retained days, then you can create a segment and take advantage of comparing those retained visitors data with your normal data and see what make them different

Like in the image above day one of 29 April 2020 retention is better than click on that box and create a segment.

3.2.4: User Explorer

This section is my favorite section. This is a kind of investigating section of users in an individual manner, fetching each and every movement right from the visit. This is so advanced that it reflects all the completed goals and events if you have created some. As you can see, this report shows any visitor movement like starting from the first page on which he or she landed, showing all the completed goals and events and the most fascinating aspect is that every time a visitor returns to the site, this continues in the same flow by segmenting them by date.

3.2.5: Demographic

In this section, with the perfect and understandable graphs, you can access information about the type of people visiting your website in terms of age and gender. As you can see in the image below, it also creates separate age sections and shows them in the form of bar charts and gender in the form of pie charts.
To analyze more deeply, you can move to their specific section where you can analyze in the form of the line chart and which will help you to target filtered users.  

3.2.6: Interests

Google Analytics Interest Reports will tell you the interests of your users in other areas of the internet. It will help you define a more relevant target market, ideas for future blog material, and more.

Go to the Audience » Interests. In the Overview section, you’ll see a breakdown of the 3 main reports:

1. Affinity Categories: This is the top-level category. For instance, it includes things like Technology, Health and Fitness, and News and Politics
2. In-Market Segments: This is the next level of interest categories. It includes products people with certain interests are looking to buy such as Consumer Electronics, Travel/Air, and Education.
3. Other Categories: This group users into categories that they are also interested in browsings, such as Arts & Entertainment, Sports, and Travel.

 Behavior

Actions Reports help us understand the actions of users on our web. With this analysis, we can see how much the users have visited our website and/or returned. Also, this type of reporting is split into three categories-

• New vs Returning – This report analyzes and divides users into new and returning, with the help of cookies. (Google Analytics tracking work on cookies) It tracks the visitors who visited again on our website. This report really helps in understanding which user type is more likely to convert.
• Frequency vs Recency – This report depends on the session, this shows how many sessions visitors take before leaving the site now you must be thinking that what is session. So let me tell you that a “session is a specific period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, by default, it is set to 30 min but you can change that accordingly”.
  Let’s come back to the topic as you can see in the image below that almost 90% of visitors are taking a single session only.
• Engagement – Breaks down visitor’s sessions into session duration which means that in a single session how much time visitors are spending.

3.2.6: User Flow

The Users Flow report is a graphical representation of the pathways followed by the users after landing on your site, from the start, through the different pages, and where they left your site through their journeys. In this report, you’ll see…

• Green boxes: They represent pages and are labeled as URLs.
• Curved gray lines: They represent visitors flowing from page to page. The thicker the line, the more users follow that path.
• Red lines (drop off): They represent the percentage of visitors that exit the site after visiting that page.

It demonstrates you the exact steps that users have taken to accomplish a task on your website: 

• Where are your website visitors landing?
• Different pages of visitors are navigating through your website.
• From which page they exit your website?

For example – Let’s take an example of an eCommerce website, there is a proper step the users have to follow for purchasing the product so for instance a user landed on the product page from the US, selected the product, and move to add to the cart page. Then moves to the checkout page and finally on the thankyou page after buying successfully. This is the proper flow of eCommerce transactions that you can easily understand in this user flow section. The most fascinating aspect is that by checking the red line drop just next to the box you can easily understand and capture where this flow breaks (check that in the picture below).

Note * In this Audience section I covered all the important subsections that are essential as a beginner there are some subsections left that will be discussed in the advanced stage. 

This is all about the portion of the audience. We are now heading toward ABC which is Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion. You may think it’s just a coincidence that each section’s first letter from a sequence of alphabets, but that’s not true, there’s always a motive behind every Google invention.

The acquisition involves acquiring something like the user, in this case, you can see all the details relating to how and from where users are acquired, which is also the first stage of analysis.
Then after acquiring how users are behaving on-site, that is behavior. And in the last part, you’d like to know how they’re converted now, you might understand why they’re labeled by Google and what’s the reason behind this, just explaining the whole funnel in a sequence.

3.3: Acquisition Section

As an online business holder or as a blogger, you all must have one question in your mind that is –
How are people finding my website?

Because it is really good to know your best and profitable sources. Once you have that information, you have a better idea of where you should spend most of your time and effort to gain profit.

You can find all this information and more in Google Analytics.

More precisely, you can find data and insights into traffic acquisition in the Google Analytics Acquisition Reports section.

3.3.1: Overview
This is the overview section of acquisition where you can see the list of the top channels explaining where the user is coming from and their behavior. Like how they are performing and which channels are most converting channels for your business. 

PRO TIP* Source is where your website’s traffic comes from (individual websites, Google, Facebook, etc). Medium is how it got there (organic traffic, paid traffic, referral, etc). You will be dealing with this source /medium reports a lot in the future so you should be understanding this pretty well”.

3.3.2: All traffic 

This section describes each and everything related to the traffic websites receive. Like visitors’ sources and mediums that can be social, referral, or organic.
This also includes reports from other tools like Google Ads and Google Search Console.  

• Channels You can see the list of the top channels explaining where the user is coming from and their behavior like how they are performing and which channels are the most converting channels for your business.
  

Let’s move further and talk about the different channel in All traffic section mentioned in the image above 

Direct – This usually means that someone accessed your website directly, either through typing in your website’s URL or a bookmark. 

Social – Traffic generated through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

Referral – Visits through any websites that link to your website or “refer” traffic to you would count as a referral.

Email – Visits through links in emails (for example, Gmail or Yahoo Mail).

Paid Search – Unlike organic search, paid search is exactly what you pay search engines’ ad networks like Google AdWords or Bing Ads to send traffic to your website.

Other Advertising – traffic generated from any other form of paid advertising that Google Analytics recognizes.

• Source/Medium We have discussed the source and medium above and that is what you will be dealing with this report. Here you can see the list of different sources and mediums your site is receiving traffic. This report can help you to analyze your top sources and mediums in terms of traffic and most importantly their behavior which helps in posting and advertising the most relevant platforms.
  
• ReferralsThis segment of All traffic displays a traffic report coming from different websites by clicking on the link of your website. This study will tell you just how well this approach works if your traffic-building program depends on driving traffic from other websites.

3.3.3: Google AdsIf you are running PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns, you should explore your AdWords reports that Google Analytics offers in order to optimize your campaign. Google Analytics AdWords reports give you post-click performance metrics for your paid traffic through AdWords. These reports help you track campaigns, bid adjustments, individual keywords’ performance, placement and keywords positions, and more. 

By reviewing Acquisition-Behavior-Conversion (ABC) cycles, you can see user’s behaviors when they click on your ads, as well as conversions and measures of ROI (Return on Investment) and RPC (Revenue per Click).

PRO TIP* There is a separate tool for AdWord reports that is Google Ads where all the ads related work like creating campaigns, analyzing the traffic coming from that campaign are performing. I personally recommend you to go from Google ADS for proper analysis of the report of the ads. 

3.3.4: Search Console
This report basically deals with all Search Engine Optimization related stuff like search position, search impression, keyword ranking, etc. In this section, you can see the query option which shows the top query performance. This is basically the game of impressions and clicks your site pages are receiving in the search results. 

 PRO TIP* But again there is a separate tool for keyword analysis that is Google Search Console and if you want to see data of Google Search Console data in Google Analytics you need to set this up by integration. 

Let’s get into this section: 

• Landing PagesThis lists your website pages performance in terms of impression, clicks, and CTRs which can be really helpful to understand which page is ranking easily and on which page you need to work.
• CountriesThis report provides a general view of impressions, clicks, and CTR by country. With the help of this report, you can easily understand which country you need to work on and which country you are working in terms of behavior and conversion.
• Device This report shows you your website search performance in different device categories like desktop, mobile, or tablet.
• Queries – This report shows the queries (keywords) users typed into Google search engine to reach your website. You get to know the impressions, clicks, and CTRs for individual queries which help you to work on the keyword which can be most useful for your business.

3.3.5: Social

The Social section gives you more comprehensive information about your website-related social activity. The Social Overview starts by giving you a rundown of conversions from different networks that are connected to social networks and traffic.

• OverviewYou will get each and every information related to all the social platforms which are bringing traffic to your site. Let’s get deeper into this section and see what else we can analyze. Social value section

Conversions: Here, you can see the total conversion from each and every channel your site has (not only social).

Assisted Social Conversions: This report shows all the transactions which are assisted by social channels.

Let’s say I click on one of your Facebook posts and go to your site. But then I leave without performing any activity and just get to know about your site. I’m just a social visit at this point. But then I come back later and am converted by completing a goal or buying a product, Then I get counted as an assisted social conversion.

Last Interaction Social Conversions: The visitor who is directly converted after coming from any social platform is considered in this conversion list.

• Network ReferralHere you can see the list of all the social channels that are bringing traffic to your site. This report helps you to easily understand which social channel is performing well and where you need to work. You can also understand customer intent by analyzing the visitor’s behavior related to the post.
• Landing PageThis shows what are the top pages which are receiving the most amount of traffic from different social media platforms. You can easily understand which page users are engaging most in terms of behavior and conversions and what are the pages where you need to work to get better engagement and increase more engagement.
  
• ConversionFor any eCommerce website or service-based site which at the end deals with online transactions, this is the best way to understand the social platform performance in terms of conversion. As you can see in the image that each social network is providing conversion in terms of numbers and conversion value.

3.4: Behavior Section

Now we move to the next stage of the funnel that is the behavior stage. Here you will understand how users are behaving on your site.

3.4.1: Overview

You can see the following metrics in the ‘Overview’ page.

• Pageviews – Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed during the selected time period. The important thing to understand here is that a user may visit multiple pages on your site, and each of those visits would count as a separate pageview.
• Unique pageviews – As the name suggests, this metric only measures the number of unique page views you receive. Unlike pageviews, if a user visits multiple web pages on your site, only his original visit would be counted in unique page views.
• Average time on page – It shows the average amount of time users spend viewing a page on your site.
• Bounce rate – The percentage of single page-visits that didn’t lead to another page visit. For instance, if someone visits a web page on your site and doesn’t visit another page, it’s called a ‘bounce’.
• Exit percentage – The exit percentage shows how often users exit from a page or set of pages when they view the page(s). Exit % is often confused with the bounce rate, but they’re not the same. If you want to learn the differences between them.

These metrics are very important because you are dealing with these incoming reports so make sure you understand them deeply before moving further. 

3.4.2: Behavior FlowThis section is my favorite section in the whole Google Analytics part because of the way data is presented which makes things more understandable.

The Behavior Flow report lets you see the direction visitors usually take from the first page they see to the last page they access before they leave your site. That is, it maps their path from the first page they’re visiting till the last page from where they exited your site.

You can easily understand users dropping off from the respective page with the help of a red drop indicator which can help to understand the pages where you need to work and the pages which are performing better.

3.4.3: Site Content

This report is all about your website page performance. Here you will see individual page visitors and their behavior data whether that page is a landing page for visitors or other pages where visitors are navigated after landing. In this section, you also get to know about pages from where most of your visitors are existing. Let’s catch them one by one – 

• All Pages In this report, you can see each and every information related to your pages like a number of visitors viewed your pages, how many of them are unique visitors, time spent on a single page, and then their behavior.
• Content drill down The Content Drilldown report is helpful for websites that have subfolders such as         domain.com/blog/ and domain.com/support/ or something similar.
• Landing pages This section provides the performance of the top pages of your website where visitors have directly landed. You can understand the performance of your landing pages by metrics provided by Google like a session, new session, bounce rate, avg, session duration, etc. You can also analyze which page helps you in bringing more conversions based on your website goals.

Before moving ahead in the landing page section, let’s make things clear related to All pages and Landing pages. Because this is one of the common report section with you will be using in future

PRO TIP*  Difference between Landing Page and All pages – Landing page report displays the information of the pages where visitors directly landed and All page reports contain the individual performance of pages by pageviews and unique pageviews, it doesn’t matter whether that page is landing page or not. 

• Exit pageThe Report on the Exit Pages shows the last sites that people visit before they leave your website. These are the pages you want to take a closer look at and see what you can do to hold your website visitors longer.

3.4.4: Site SpeedThe Site Speed section has crucial reports that identify areas of your website that you may need to optimize in terms of speed. This report covers your site speed performance in each and every aspects like –

• Browser – It shows the performance of each and every browser your site is receiving visitors from.
• Country – It also provides your site speed performance report for each and every country.

• Page – Each and every page contains different images of content length and many more things which can be the reason for the increase of speed for the individual page which can be managed by this option.

It also provides you with a wide variety of metrics that help you understand where the exact problem lies. Let’s have a look of metrics –

• Avg. Page Load Time – The average amount of time (in seconds) it takes for pages to load from initiation of the pageview (e.g., a visitor clicks on a page link) to load completion in the browser.
• Avg. Redirection Time – The average amount of time (in seconds) spent in redirects before fetching a page.
• Avg. Domain Lookup Time – The average amount of time (in seconds) spent in DNS lookup for a page.
• Avg. Server Connection Time – The average amount of time (in seconds) spent in establishing a TCP connection for a page.
• Avg. Server Response Time – The average amount of time (in seconds) your server takes to respond to a user request, including the network time from the user’s location to your server.
• Avg. Page Download Time – The average amount of time (in seconds) to download a page.

PRO TIP* “With these metrics, you can work toward improving page load time and page download time by optimizing the content on your website. A few improvements you can make include reducing the size of images, reducing the number of add-ons (widgets, plugins, etc.) used on a page, and so forth”.

• Page TimingsThe Page Timings report displays how long your most-visited pages take to load compared to the overall average load time for your website. The red line indicates that you need to work on the pages in order to reduce the page speed and the green line indicates that the particular page is performing fine as compared to the average speed of your site.

• Speed SuggestionsThis report shows how practical Google products are. It provides a list of the page and for the individual page, it also provides suggestions by real-time analysis. Let me show you how.

You can see the data inside the red box, click on that and it will redirect you to Google Page Speed which is another Google free tool where you can see what exactly you have to do with your page to improve the performance.

3.5: Conversion section

It is the last section of Google Analytics as well as the last part of the marketing funnel where your website visitors achieve the target objective you set up as a conversion. It measures all the efforts to get your tactics to work hard and produce the result as conversions. This conversion may be a filling out of form, blog subscription, or purchase, etc.

This section contains three subsections that are – 

3.5.1: Goal

If you remember, at the starting of this blog, I helped you to set up goals in Google Analytics. At that time, you might be thinking that where we can see the reports related to the goals which are set up.

This is the section.

As I explained to you the funnel process that conversion always comes at the last and that is what you can see in Google Analytics.

• Overview

Here you can see all the information related to the goals you have created. This includes all the top-level information, with total goal completions of all goals, the goal conversion rate, abandonment rate if you have set up funnels, and finally the total completions of each goal.

You can select individual goals or all goals from the top left corner that is the goal option (the red box on the top in the image).

Below you can also see highlights from two reports, Goal URLs and Source / Medium to help you see where goals are occurring on-site and which marketing strategies have been effective in driving goal outcomes.

• Goal URLsThis report shows all the pages where goals are converted. Here also you can select individual goals or all goals in order to analyze page performance.

For example, you have set a goal that competes when users spend more than 3 minutes on your page so you can select that goal from the top and analyze which page visitors are completing that goal and on which page you need to work.

• Reverse Goal PathThis report displays the three steps that users have taken before achieving the chosen goal, as well as the page on which they participated. This is very helpful to identify issues with the goal setup. It’s also a good place to go to optimize user journeys and make completing goals simpler.
• Funnel VisualizationThis is one of the most interesting sections in Google Analytics. This funnel setup can be created while setting up a destination goal. At the time of setting the goal, there is an option that you need to select and mention all the pages which can come in the way of that final destination page. For Example – Let’s say you’ve built a final thank you page destination goal and you’ve picked all the pages including checkout, add to the cart, product page, etc. Now you will see the performance after receiving the data, which looks like you see in the above image.

You can see each and every information related to that goal including all the pages users visited before entering the final destination. You can also see from which pages users are breaking this funnel and even you can also analyze where they are leaving, that can be exiting from your site or moving to different pages that are not included in the funnel. 

3.5.2 : eCommerce section

If you are dealing with an eCommerce business then this section is for you. In this section, you will see all the information related to your sales-related data like your product performance, product transaction-related information, shopping behavior, and many more but this is not as simple as you may think.

You have to do some technical implementation on your site in order to track your product-related transaction data. You have to set up eCommerce tracking which is not possible without taking the help of your developer.

There are other options also like you can use an eCommerce plugin that will set up eCommerce tracking or you can take the help of Google Tag Manager also. 

Note* don’t worry I will be explaining about eCommerce in my next blog where I’ll be covering each and every step needed to set up eCommerce tracking. 

This section is a bit advanced but let’s take a look at some subsection of eCommerce.

• OverviewFirst, let’s look at some metrics. In Google Analytics, the eCommerce Overview report (Conversions >eCommerce > Overview) provides site-wide statistics on revenue and orders. Key metrics to focus on are:

• eCommerce Conversion Rate – the percentage of Sessions (site visits) that result in purchases.
• Transactions – total number of purchases made through the site
• Revenue – total amount spent
• Average order value – the average amount of revenue earned for each order
• Unique purchases – number of times any individual product (or group of products) was included in a transaction

These are the metrics that are showing data of your product sold from the site.

• Shopping BehaviorThe Shopping Behavior Analysis report lets you see the number of sessions that include each stage of your purchase funnel, then how many sessions continue to the next step and how many abandoned from each step with the red down arrow in the image above.

In this report, you can analyze how users are behaving starting from viewing your product till purchasing. With the help of this report, you can easily understand what is your product conversion rate, whether it’s from view to a thankyou page rate or from checkout to a thankyou page. 

NOTE* if you are interested in checking out this reporting section I can help you with this Just mention in the comment.    

3.5.3: Multi-channel funnel

Google Analytics always focused on the last conversion channel in normal until they invented this section of reporting. In this section, you can find the channel which is assisting in conversion, for example, let us suppose one visitor came from organic, and visited your product, took all the information, and went away. Then the same visitor visited again by typing your URL that comes under direct traffic and is converted o  you will see that direct traffic is responsible for the conversion because Google Analytics give full weight to the last acquisition medium but practically the organic source/medium plays a big role in this conversion and that is what this Multi-Channel funnel reports explain.

• OverviewThe Multi-Channel Funnels can demonstrate, in clear terms, how your marketing channels (traffic sources) work together to produce sales or other conversions on your web.

If you see in the image above, there is a section called Multi-channel conversion visualizer which helps in understanding how much each channel is important in conversion.

• Assisted conversion This report provides in-depth information on the role of each of your channels and their performance. These terms are important to understand:
• Assisted Conversion the number of conversions for which this channel appeared on the conversion path, but was not the final conversion interaction.
• Assisted Conversion Value – the value of the conversions assisted by this channel.
• Last Click or Direct Conversions – the number of conversions for which this channel was the final conversion interaction.
• Last Click or Direct Conversion Value – the value of the conversions for which this channel was the final conversion interaction.
• Assisted / Last Click or Direct Conversions – a value close to 0 indicates that this channel functioned primarily as the final conversion interaction. A value close to 1 indicates that this channel functioned equally in an assist role and as the final conversion interaction. The more this value exceeds 1, the more this channel functioned in an assist role.
• Top conversion path In this report, you can understand the common combination of the paths that work for your conversions. You can increase the path length from the top to check more insights in assisted conversions.
• Time lag This report indicates how long (in day’s) users take to convert after coming to your website. This indicates the number of days, conversions, conversion value, and the total percentage of conversions and conversion value.
• Path length This is slightly different from time length, this report provides how many interaction users take to convert. This report deals with the session so you can also say how many session users normally take to convert.

4. FAQs

Q1: Which one is more important? Bounce Rate or Exit Rate?

Before understanding the importance, you should understand what is and what are the differences between them. Bounce Rate is calculated as bounce over a single page view, here a single page view means that the bounce rate will only be counted when the user landed on the page and exited without entering the second page.

Exit rate, on the other hand, looks at the number of people who exit your website after landing on a page and compares it to the total number of views the page received.

According to the definition, both seem to be common in working but there are some differences: Bounce rate is only counted when the visitor viewed only one page and exited from there otherwise bounce rate will be zero but and the page will only be considered in the bounce if the page is landing page (first page) for the session that is not the case in exit rate.

Now when it comes to which metric is important, then I would say both because they are important in different contexts. 

For example, average bounce rates don’t give you much actionable insight since some pages might benefit from higher bounce rates (e.g. contact information pages) and some types of websites might be predisposed to higher bounce rates (e.g. blogs). A high exit rate usually signals problems in your conversion funnel. Like this, there are different situations where both can be considerable. Therefore, you should choose the metric you optimize for based on the problem area you are trying to tackle.

Q2: What is a funnel in Google Analytics?

 A funnel is a navigation path of visitors who visited your site. In Google Analytics, there are different ways to create funnels but the process is the same where you create a proper flow by adding different pages in sequence or creating a sequence in the same page by different steps.

There are different type of funnel in Google Analytics- 

• Goal funnel – where you create destination goals by adding pages which can be the part the user has to visit before landing on the destination page for example- the user has to flow through the add to cart page then checkout page before landing on the thankyou page. So you can create a funnel goal by adding these pages in the path.
• eCommerce shopping behavior funnel – This section is only available when you set up eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics. The Shopping Behavior Analysis report lets you see the number of sessions that included each stage of your purchase funnel, then how many sessions continue to the next step and how many abandoned from each step with the red down arrow in the image above.
• Checkout behavior funnel – this funnel looks the same as shopping behavior funnel showing the flow of the checkout process. In this funnel, you can check how your checkout page is behaving, like how many users are filling billing info then clicking on proceed to pay and then completing their session with the transaction. You can also analyze from which section your user is breaking or dropping off.

Q3: How can you identify the most popular pages of your site in Google Analytics?

There are several ways to classify which page is most popular on traffic and behavioral terms. Usually, I go with Behavior > Site Content > Landing Page, it will tell you all the information about the performance of your webpage, Like how much traffic your pages receive, how your visitors interact like how much time they spend, which section they most engage in, and at the end, you can also check that the page also brings conversion for your business by providing data such as the goal complaint or transaction if an e-commerce store, and so on.

5: Conclusion

Now It’s Your Turn to Track

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that opens a whole new dimension of possibilities of improving your business numbers and growth. With a plethora of features and an uncomplicated setup, Google Analytics will let you analyze business processes closely and use this data to make better business decisions and stay ahead of your competitors all the time.

As far as features and functionalities of the tool are concerned, this guide is just the start. There is a lot more than you can do with this effective analytics tool and I would be covering that in my next few articles.

Which of the Google Analytics features do you consider to be the most helpful? Are you using Google Analytics for your business currently? How are the results? Do you plan to use Google Analytics in the near future? Are there any disadvantages to consider?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.