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Google Analytics Version 5 Video Walkthrough

Analytics, Videos 5th Oct 2011

Hello, I’m Anna Lewis, and I’m going to take you through finding your way around the new Google Analytics interface on behalf of Koozai.

Here you can easily see all of your accounts, and you can search these to find the ones you’re looking for. You can also use the search function to search your list of accounts and click through these. This navigation is available throughout all of your reports and enables you to switch between profiles very quickly and easily. It also always gives you access to the Settings option.

So just by clicking this cog, you can access the settings areas, set up your goals, filters, and adjust your settings.

So, what is available? Here we can see Dashboards. Now, that is a custom area you can set up another time, and that enables you to see exactly what you’re looking for in one place.

Here we’ve got My Site, and you can see the Reports and Intelligence. Today we’re going to be focusing on the Reports area, which enables you to find the basic data.

Conversions, also for another day, it looks more specifically at Goals, Ecommerce, and Multi-channel Funnels.

Then we’ve got Custom reports. This is something else that you can set up to see the data more specifically.

So, when you first click through to an account from the homepage, you’ll be taken to the Reports page. This is a sample website that I am just using today. The Overview page that you see when you arrive has a few bits of information. But the main way of navigating the new Google Analytics is by the left-hand navigation. So here we can see we’ve got the sections Visitors, Advertising, Traffic Sources, Content, and Conversions. Now you can usually guess what is going to be in each of them and where you might be able to find your data.

Whilst I work in SEO and PPC, the main area that I am going to be looking at is the Traffic Sources Report. Here you click through all of the options, and it will only load the page when you are at the bottommost level. So if I click on Organic, I can then see all of the organic keywords. If I click “Overview of Search”, I can see Organic and Paid if I were to have any paid keywords.

You can then break this information down using the tabs. We’ve got Keyword. We’ve got Source. You can also select anything else that you might want to.

In your Keyword Report, you can use the Search or even the Advanced Search to narrow things down. If you want to do anything more complicated, you would have to use the Advanced Segments much in the same way as you did before. Advanced Segments can be found up here.

So, here’s your data. How else can you look at it? Well, let’s have a look over here. There are some new methods of viewing your data. Google actually provides you with a Term Cloud now, also known as a Tag Cloud. This shows you all of the keywords that have brought visitors to your site by significance. It’s a really nice way to visualise your data.

You can also see things via pie charts or even bar charts with comparisons. Have a quick flick through here because actually some of these can give you the data that you want for your clients or your website really quickly.

So there’s our traffic. What do we do to find out which keywords have led to goals? Well, let’s go back to our main keyword report, and then look at the gray bar at the top. Now, if we had any goals set up, you would be able to click through them here. For now, we have Ecommerce enabled, so you can see any information here about Ecommerce data related to the keywords.

You would also be able to access the conversion data through this Conversion Report. So let’s take a look. Here we can see Goals and Ecommerce data. Click through these in much the same way as you would in the old interface. You’ve also got the handy segmentation up here so you can see all of your goals within one set of statistics, or you can see one at a time.

Having found your conversion and your traffic source data, you might want to find out more about your visitors. So let’s have a look. Where might they be based? If we click on the Location segment, we can see the map with all of the traffic as to where our visitors are. You can easily break this down at region level and city level. So let’s click on City. Here we can see the spread of visitors and where they’re located. You can break this down even further if you wanted and see lots of data. You can also use the Explorer tab, and this shows you when visitors from each location visited.

Here you can also access your Custom Variables or your Languages and anything you might have defined as custom. There is also the section for behaviour, which includes new versus returning and a nice, simple pie chart with your information.

Now a nice little part of Google Analytics has always been working out which browser is most popular with your users. Then you can ensure your website works best for those people who are actually using it. So here we can see Internet Explorer has actually led to a large number of visits for this site. The pie chart describes this nicely. There has only been one visit on anything that might have been mobile or on iPad or even an iPhone.

So we can scroll through this list here. We can see Operating System, Screen Resolution. We can see Screen Colours. It is making all of the data a little bit more accessible without you having to know exactly where it is hidden.

There is also this new area called Social. Now here we can see anybody who has clicked the +1 button as default. If they have clicked the +1 button, we would see Socially Engaged as an option here. Now this website doesn’t actually have the +1 button on. But if you were to have the +1 button or even a Twitter button or a Facebook button, you would be able to set up the data so that you could actually pull in the data, and you would actually see all of them lumped together here. Under Action, if you had Twitter and Facebook and +1, you would see the information here. You could then break that down by Site Usage. Now this is really good for working out how people on social networks actually integrate with your site. So it is very good of Google to actually include this information here.

We can also see good information about mobile visits to the site. Yes and no. From here, you can segment your data further using any of the normal methods – Searching, Ecommerce, Goals, and Advanced Segments.

I’m going to take you through the more complicated things that require custom setups another day, but for now, this is how you navigate the area.

The next one, we’ve got Advertising, and it automatically pulls in your information from AdWords. This account doesn’t actually use AdWords, so we won’t see any data here. But it is useful to find this and have it in its own little section here, which is very useful.

We’ve got content as well. So we can scroll through, and we can actually go down and look at the pages that were visited. Here we’ve got a list of all of the pages. Let’s say you want to see them by title. Well, that’s easy too. Again, you can segment them, view them in any way, and also sort by weighted sort.

Over here, we’ve got the section for Events, and we’ve also got In-Page Analytics. But the new thing over here is Site Speed. If you add a little piece of code to your tracking code, you’ll be able to see how fast your pages load. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough data here to see anything, but you could see by page what your average load time is. Now obviously, there has been discussion about this having an importance in your search engine rankings. It is a small factor, but it is good for your users. It’s good to know which pages are actually taking rather too long to load and which ones you need to do something about.

We can also see up here a Performance tab. So here we could see even more information if we had the data available.

So that’s all for today, but look out for future videos that are going to take you through like Multichannel Funnels. Sign up for our YouTube page and keep an eye out for our blog posts on the topics. I have been Anna Lewis from Koozai.

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