Understanding the Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics is one of those applications that you can use for your web analytics data collection.  Understanding how to use the application for your own needs does present a learning curve for beginner users and the first thing to understand other then how to install the Google Analytics tracking code is understanding how to use the dashboard in your Google Analytics account.  So let’s explore the Dashboard in greater depth inside your Google Analytics account.  In this article I am going to cover the following areas of the dashboard…

• Site Usage
• Visitors Overview
• Content Overview
• Traffic Sources Overview
• Map Overlay
• Goals Overview

Site Usage

The Site Usage area in the Google Analytics dashboard contains a wealth of useful statistics that quickly allow you to check the latest happenings on your website.  The metrics included in this area are visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, percentage of new visits and average time on site.

Visitors Overview

The Visitors Overview area in your Google Analytics dashboard gives you a snapshot of the number of your visitors.  This is not the same metric as visits in the Site Usage area because this shows you the number of visitors who came to your site over a given period of time.

When you click on “View Report” this will take you to a more detailed page with details of your visitors, visitor segmentation and specifics about the browsers, connection speed, map overlay and other data related to your visitors and their visitors to your website.

Content Overview

Some websites like blogs, forums and for those of you publishing articles on your websites are all about content so it’s only fitting that it deserves its own place in the Google Analytics dashboard.  The focus of the content overview section is tracking hits and metrics related to how people are accessing and viewing your content and where they came from.  In here you can track the entrance keywords, entrance sources, entrance paths and more information about how people have viewed your content.

Traffic Sources Overview

Just as it sounds, the Traffic Sources Overview allows to you see various types of traffic that your website has coming into it from search engines, directly (meaning that people came in directly to your site by typing your domain name), referring sources and other traffic sources like Twitter and Feedburner to name a few.  You can check the top traffic sources for your website and see how it’s performing and the most popular keywords that people are using to find content on your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others.

Map Overlay

The Map Overlay section in the Google Analytics dashboard gives you an easy to use graphic representation of where your website’s visitors are coming from in the world.  Clicking “view report” gives you an enlarged version of a map of the world and when you hover over a country that recorded hits on your website you’ll see numbers associated to visitors from a country.  What you’ll also notice is that the countries that had traffic coming to your website are ranked in terms of who supplied the most amount of visitors to the least.

The Goals Overview

The Goals Overview section of the reporting that Google Analytics offers is dependent on the fact that you have setup goals for your website.  If you’ve never setup a goal in Google Analytics before then this will not come into play just yet.  I will not get into setting up goals in Google Analytics in this article but needless to say the Goals Overview section provides a snapshot of the success of current goals you are tracking in Google Analytics on your website.  Clicking on the “view report” link for the Goals Overview section provides you additional information about your goals including your goal conversion rate and Total goal value calculation.

There is a wealth of knowledge that you can learn about your website stored in web analytics platforms like Google Analytics.  It’s just a question of mastering the user interface and understanding information about your website and will help you to move around and do more advanced things in Google Analytics faster, easier and with greater confidence.