Tutorial for beginners on how to use Google Analytics to track visitor activity on your website.

1. How to use Google Analytics
Learn how to use Google Analytics to track your website
traffic, including:
 Total site visits, visitors, page views, avg. time of visits, and bounce rates
 How to identify your most popular webpages and content
 Visitors’ geographic location
 New vs. returning visitors
 Desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet traffic
 How to export reports or set up automated reporting emails
 How adding secondary reporting dimensions can increase the value of
standard reports
Google Analytics Help

2. How to select a report’s date
range in Google Analytics
Select the date range in your reports, use the pull-down menu in the upper right side of
the page. You can choose from a list of predefined date ranges (such as last month) or
you can enter a custom date range here.
You also can select a date range to compare the stats to, which is helpful for month-to-
month or year-to-year comparisons.
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3. How to export a Google Analytics
Report
To export any report from Google Analytics, select an option from the pull-
down menu as shown here.
Google Analytics Help

4. Real-Time reporting:
Overview
To see real-time activity of who is using your website, select the Real Time
category in Google Analytics. The overview is shown here, but you can also
review real-time geographical locations, traffic sources, and content to
identify user trends.
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5. Audience > Overview
The Audience Overview tab of Google Analytics provides a quick summary of activity:
Total site visits, number of visitors, total pageviews, average number of pages viewed per
visit, average length of each visit, bounce rate (# of times people leave your site, which
indicates they didn’t find the content they were searching for), % of new visitors, and what
language they speak.
It is helpful to review this report on a monthly basis. Google Analytics Help

6. Audience > Overview: adding
additional data points for comparison
Sometimes it can be helpful to add a secondary reporting dimension to standard
Google Analytics reports. To add a secondary dimension for comparison, choose an
option to compare. Shown here is the Audience > Overview report, with an added
comparison for total site visits vs. the percentage of new visitors. This can help
identify patterns of when new visitors are reaching your site.
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7. Geographic breakout by
location
Select Audience > Geo > Location to see where your visitors come from. The
default view is by country, simply click on a country to see more detailed info – such
as U.S. states. Clicking on a state will further drill down into the information to a city
level. Google Analytics Help

8. Audience > Behavior > New vs. Returning
How to track new vs. returning visitors:
This tab lets you see new versus returning visitors. This info is helpful to
determine whether your site is reaching a new audience, or if your traffic is
primarily the same users returning frequently. Monitoring new visitor activity
can help you identify if new marketing efforts are effective at driving traffic to
your site.
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9. Identifying the devices used to
view your website
Knowing how users access your site is important as more web traffic shifts to smaller
screens. Many older sites were built to display properly on desktop computers. If a
lot of your web traffic comes from tablets and phones, it may impact user experience.
If your site displays oddly on phones and tablets, consider a responsive design
website. Responsive sites optimize the appearance of the site based on a user’s
screen size, greatly improving layout and the user experience on phones and tablets.
Google Analytics Help

10. Audience Acquisition
Overview
How do users reach your website? The Acquisition Overview will break out your
traffic into organic (unpaid) search, direct traffic (people who type domain into url
bar, or use bookmarks), referral traffic (traffic from links on other sites), and
social media traffic.
The Keyword subcategory in this section will show you paid and organic
keywords used by visitors, indicating what search engine queries are delivering
users to your site.
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11. Acquisition: All Traffic
Knowing how visitors reach your site can help you identify effective marketing
channels to grow your audience. For example, if you notice a large increase in traffic
from a url associated with a specific social media channel, it makes sense to
increase promotional efforts on that channel.
If you see a large jump in traffic from a specific source, such as a blog post on
online newspaper article linking to your site, then you may want to reach out and try
to get similar coverage to further increase traffic.
Google Analytics Help

12. Behavior > Overview
How to tell your site’s most popular pages
The Behavior > Overview tab will give a quick breakdown of your most popular pages.
Identifying your most popular pages is very helpful when planning future content that will
resonate with your audience. Note that “/index.html” is your homepage.
Clicking on a specific page on the right side list will bring up page details. See next slide
for info on adding secondary reporting dimensions to improve usefulness of this report.
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13. Behavior > Site Content > All pages:
Adding a secondary dimension
To see traffic for a specific page, click on that page from the list under Site Content >
Overview. Once the results from the selected page are showing, click on the “Secondary
Dimension” button and select Acquisition > Medium to show traffic sources:
You will then see a breakout of where how users reached this page:
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14. How to set up automatic reporting
emails in Google Analytics
Scheduling Google Analytics reports to be sent to you by email is easy. Simply
click the “email” button once you’ve accessed the report you’d like to receive.
You can enter recipient info, the subject, the attachment format, and the the
frequency.
Make sure to indicate how long you’d like to receive this automated report
under “advanced options” – the default timeframe is 6 months, and you can
select up to 12 months. Google Analytics Help

15. Thank you for reading our tutorial on how to use
Google Analytics to track activity on your website.
We hope you found it helpful!
If you have questions or are looking for more help
with setting up or using Google Analytics on your
site, feel free to visit us here:
Google Analytics help and consultation: Archerfish Media