How To Use Google Analytics Reports

Whenever I post a graph from my Google Analytics (GA), I always get asked about how I got my reports so I'm going to write this post so I can pass it on to others and I hope you will find it useful.

I don't know a lot about GA, but what I know gets me by, so I'm just going to show you what I usually use.

I actually don't remember what GA looks like when you first log on because I always just go to my bookmarked link to the reports right away, so I'll go from my memory.

First, pick the Analytics Account you want to look at, when you click on the account, you will have to click the account again under "Properties and Apps", then under "Views" choose "All Web Site Data".

This is where I get all my reports and you should see this menu on the left:

What I use the most on this menu are: Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior.

I don't use Conversions, but Jay has a webinar on this:

Creating Goals In Analytics

I will now go over each of the ones I use.

Remember "sessions" mean "number of visits" - not unique visits.

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Real-Time

If you don't have that much traffic, you'll be like me in the beginning and never seeing anyone on your site real time. Always a big fat zero.

Once you get some traffic at like 200 visits a day, you may start to see some on here.

You have to remember that each person going on your site can be as quick as 15 seconds to 5 mins.

Catching a glimpse of someone on your site is very hard if you don't have enough traffic.

Nowadays I get to see up to about 4 people on my site at a time and you can see the pages they are on.

To see the data, click Real-Time, Overview.

You can see in the above, there are three pages they are on and two are on the same page, thus 4 people and their locations.

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Audience

I use Audience > Overview a lot for a general "how much traffic did I get yesterday" type of number quickly.

This is the graph that's in my October - What A Month! post:

You can choose the dates of your choice in the upper right corner and the default is last 30 days.

You can make comparison data like Oct vs Sep by selecting dates and you'll get great data:

And it'll give you all the percentage changes too:

If you keep scrolling down, you'll see which countries your users are from and what platforms they use to view, etc.

I don't really use anything else in this section except Overview but you can click on the other categories under Audience to find all sorts of data on your audience including demographics, interests, technology, behavior, etc.

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Acquisition

I really like this section because you get to see your traffic channels.

Go to Overview and you'll get this:

The right side is just a squished up version of the Audience > Overview graph.

If you scroll down on this screen, you will get actual numbers that make up each channel of traffic that totals to your traffic for the month.

You can click on each channel (except for Organic cuz it's not accurate) to see where your traffic are from on this view, but you can also get to it by going: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

For Organic, you need to go to your Search Console to see your data there.

If you connect your Search Console to your GA, you can actually see that data under this section: Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages.

Remember there is a lag in Search Console's data reporting, like mine is not showing the last day of Oct while it's Nov 2 as I'm writing this, but this is where you will see where your search traffic is coming from, the landing pages (your posts people go on) from Google.

Also, Search Console uses the term "Clicks" this is what indicates how many people clicked on your post from the SERP. These "Clicks" should match the clicks you see under Search Console but will not match your "Sessions" because that includes total visits which could be visits from different sources unless you're only looking at Organic traffic, this will match closer to "Clicks".

If you use Adwords, you can connect that to GA and use Acquisition > Adwords, but I don't use it so I won't talk more about that.

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Behavior

This section looks at your Pageviews and analyzes how many times your pages are viewed.

You can look at Overview here to give you a quick snapshot of what your top 10 pages are.

But if you go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, you can see more of your pages and see what your top 100 are, etc.

All pages will give you the total amount of times these pages have been viewed and could be by the same person in the same visit.

I like to also look at Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages because it shows me which pages bring in my visitors and this is from all your traffic sources which is important to see which pages are the ones bringing you the most traffic.

You can get a nice glimpse of how your visitors behave on your site if you use this here: Behavior > Behavior Flow (just under Overview).

This shows you where your visitors go on your site after the initial landing pages they visit.

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Those are the main reports I use and I hope you will find them useful as well. :)

It's really just a matter of clicking on those menus to see what you get and check out the data. If the data means something to you, that's great, if not, skip it.

I hope this helps and if you know something else please ADD IT IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!

Thank you!
Grace