The Google Analytics dashboard - explained

So now that I've taken you through the process of signing up for and installing Google Analytics, it's time to dive into the reporting interface! Once you've given your account at least 24 hours to collect some data, simply click on the "View Reports" link, which will take you to the dashboard. By default, these are the key performance indications (KPIs) that are displayed on the dashboard:

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

You can arrange the metrics any way you wish. Simply move your mouse pointer over the heading of the box, the cursor will become an arrow. You can then click and drag it to any position you wish. This is useful if certain metrics are more important to you. For example, if you're most interested in your goal performance, you'll want to drag that box to the top to see how it's performing first!

The dashboard, while basic, still can provide great insight into the performance of key areas of your website. I'll go through them one at a time.

The Big Graph at the Top

This graph has no particular name or label. That's because it isn't dedicated to one metric, it really is just a big graph!

This graph represents the values over the time range you've chosen, for the metric that you've chosen. By default, the date range is the last 30 days, and the metric is Visits. You can of course modify the date range, and you can choose from the following metrics:

• Visits
• Pageviews
• Pages/Visit
• Avg. Time on Site
• Bounce Rate
• % New Visits

To select a new date range, click the down arrow beside the displayed date:

First click the date you'd like to use as the starting date for your report:

Then click the end date, the date you'd like to report until:

Click 'Apply Range', and you'll now see the data available between your chosen dates. Alternately, you can do this visually with the 'Timeline' tool, by dragging the sliders to encompass your desired reporting period:

This is not the most detailed report/graph, but it gives you a quick overview of the performance of your site.

The Site Usage KPI

The Site Usage KPI is great, it gives you six important metrics at a glance, one of which wasn't available in the previous interface (time on site). For each metric, clicking on the link beside the number gives you a breakdown over time.

1. Visits - you can quickly see how many visits (not to be confused with unique visitors) were reported in that time frame.
2. Pages/Visit - this gives you an idea of the 'stickiness' of your site, or the effectiveness of your navigation, depending on your site. With a hobbyist/informational site, having a higher number here means that each visitor viewed more pages on your site, so it was quite 'sticky', it kept them stuck there. With a business site, where your goal is to get people the information they need and convert them as quickly as possible, you want a lower number here, as it tells you that people were quickly able to get to where they need to be.
3. Bounce Rate - while there may be some exception to this rule, your goal should be to continually lower this number. A bounce rate is the number of people that have come on to your site and jumped off (bounced) on the first page. To quote the Help button for this report:
   Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
4. Pageviews - this one's pretty self-explanatory. This is a basic traffic indicator, not usually that powerful as a marketing report.
5. Avg. Time on Site - this measures the time visitors spend interacting with your site, and can be a good determinant of visitor quality and site usability. The only difficulty here is that some users leave the site open in a browser window while doing something in another.
6. % New Visits - A higher percentage of new visitors indicates that you are successful at driving traffic to your site, as opposed to a higher number of return visitors, which means that the site engaging enough for visitors to come back. Depending on the nature of your site, one of these two metrics will be preferred.

Visitors Overview

This report gives you a quick snapshot of your unique visitors over time.

This is usually less than Visits, because there will probably be some visitors that come back, and while that creates another 'visit', it's tracked as the same unique visitor. One small caveat - there is a degree of error in this report. A small percentage of visitors will not have JavaScript, or will not load the page fully and therefore not load the Google Analytics tracking code. These visitors will only be tracked in a log-file based Analytics solution, such as AWstats, so you may want to run both in tandem to get the fullest reports. Clicking the 'view report' link takes you to the Visitors Overview, where you'll find some of the same metrics from the dashboard, as well as a few Technical specs.

Map Overlay

This metric gives you a quick snapshot of where your visitors are coming from:

This is most useful if your business is local, or if you're running a location-specific pay per click campaign. Clicking anywhere on the map will take you to the details for the continent you clicked on, and you can drill down further, right to city level. Keep in mind that this is based on the IP location of the visitor, which is more often the ISP location rather than the actual physical location of the visitor.

Traffic Sources Overview

This is a quick snapshot of where your visitors are coming from:

"Direct Traffic" means visitors who typed your site URL directly into their browser, or clicked a bookmark to come to your site. A higher percentage here indicates a stronger brand. "Referring Sites" means visitors who clicked on a link to your site from another site. "Search Engines" means visitors who came to your site from a search engine result page. A higher percentage here is generally preferred, as it indicates that your SEO efforts are effective!

Content Overview

This is a quick list of the top 5 most visited pages on your website, pretty straightforward:

Clicking 'view report' will take you to a slightly more detailed overview, where you can then further navigate to find high bounce rate pages, etc.

Goals Overview

This is a quick snapshot of how your goals are performing/converting:

Almost every website owner has a goal for his visitors. It may be to sign up for a newsletter, buy a widget, register as a user, download a whitepaper, and many other things. Whatever the case, these should be tracked as Goals. I'll explain how to set these up in a later article.

Tracking Results Over Time

My absolute favorite new feature of the slick new interface is the ability to compare current data to past data. This gives you a very quick way to see if your marketing efforts are paying off. Simply click the down arrow beside the date range as though you were going to change the date, then check "Compare to past", then click "Apply Range". You will now see the past data in green on the graphs, and percentages of increase or decrease beside numeric metrics, like this:

As you can see in the results, the number of visits has increased almost 13%, but the pages/visit has decreased almost 16%. This could mean that I've been successful at driving more traffic to the site, but perhaps the visitor quality or engagement was lower. This is an awesome tool for delivering monthly progress reports!

Conclusion

Well, that's the dashboard in a nutshell. It's simple, but extremely useful. I'll go into the more detailed reports in coming articles.