Advanced Access Blog

Here is a quick guide to Google Analytics for our clients who are using their statistic program. Let’s start with this and then let us know if you have any questions.  Google does have a nice help area but since we have been playing with the program ourselves and are (sort of) familiar with it now, we would be happy to help you!

When you open up Google Analytics you are brought to the Executive Overview. This will show you a graph of:

- Visits and Pageviews
- New & Returning visitors
- GeoMap Overlay
- Visits by Source

Under the graph of Visits and Pageviews, you can click on ‘Show All’ to show the actual numbers. Sometimes the two lines will be very close together but it will give you a quick gauge of what your average visits are.  The weekend always seems to be much lower.

Now, let’s see where all these people are coming from.

Under ‘All Reports’ click on Marketing Optimization –> Visitor Segment Performance –> Referring Source

Now here is your typical Google Analytics information page.  Let’s go over a few quickies first.

The top row let’s you scroll through your pages with the Previous & Next links. The Display pulldown defaults to 10 but you can change that to list more. So if you have 100 referral sources you can either scroll through 10 times via Previous & Next or set your display options to 100 to ‘see all’.  The higher the display options, the longer loading it will take.  Just a warning.

Filter is kind of neat as you can type in something and use the plus and minus mark to filter everything BUT what you typed in or look for ONLY that.  Try typing in Google and experimenting with plus and minus mark and you can see what I mean.

The Graph column lets you scroll through visual aid of the columns below.  The different columns are relating to specific conversion goals you can set up using Google’s tools.

Now, the specific graph below has many interesting things in it.  There are ‘help’ notes below that guide you through the buttons on a limited range.  It took me awhile to realize it though so let me walk you through it.

First, here is a nice visual aid from another blog.

You can see if you click on the ‘red’ bullet you have many options to choose from. 

When you have referrals from Google (Organic) that means their organic search engine which is always interesting! The pulldown will list ‘Cross Segment Performance’ and will give you more options.  Selecting ‘Keyword’ will give you a list of keywords people typed in to find your website.

If you see a referral from a site that says (referral) next to it, that means it came from a specific website and page.  To see what page the people came from, click on the red bullet again, Cross Segment Performance, and then click on ‘Content’.  That will list out for you the full URL from where the visitor came. That can help you pinpoint if people are linking to you from a particular page, etc.

Compare and Contrast

When you are on the referral page, to quickly compare and contrast your results from past weeks, there is a calendar sitting on your lower left side. Above the calendar it says ‘Date Range’, a question mark, and then farther to the right there is two small box calendars over each other.  If you click the two boxes, that will reload the page and give you a nice chart that tells you were you are with your referrals.

Calendar

The Calendar is pretty each to work with. Since you are in compare and contrast mode, you can select different amounts of time to work with.  You can also simply click the ‘two boxes’ again and go back to one amount of time.  To select a different date range, the calendar  has a ‘View by’ pull down menu and next to it there is one single calendar box. Select that box and you can enter in a range of time to view your statistics.

All Reports

Definitely take the time to browse through All Reports.  There are several different choices there.  As I said, my favorite is the referral section (Referring Source). Geo-Location is also fun to check once in awhile to see your different visitors from around the globe.  A few other options can be tied into your PPC programs and also you can set up goals and conversions.

Under ‘Content Optimization’ reports there are some helpful sections as well. Top content will tell you your top pages

Under ‘Navigational Analysis’ you can learn your entrance bounce rates, which if you have links to an outside MLS link may seem high because people may be clicking directly to your MLS link.  Exit points can be helpful for determining if your content needs to be tweaked to get them to stay longer or how your page is configured.

Site Overlay is definitely fun.  Mentioned here is that some of the links didn’t seem to work. Many times the graphical overlay will not work with flash content or javascript.  If it is working, it will show little boxes over your links. You need to carefully hover your mouse over the box until your mouse turns into a hand.  Once it does, click your mouse and information will show up on how many clicks you have received, what percentage of clicks, and if you have any goals setup, if any of them reached those goals. Honestly, I’m not to wild about this feature as when I test it on our company site the clicks seem really odd in places and don’t make sense. Anna may have information on this later.

Initial navigation and all navigation go over your pages in detail. All navigation is very nice as it will tell you where the clicks came from in your site and where they clicked out to.

Creating Filters & Goals
Google has some good help text on filters and goals that you should read through if you would like to set up those types of things.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Techie Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.