What I Look At With Google Analytics

Well I am not sure how many people out there really look at their site’s statistics but I am someone who looks at them every day to see what is going on.  Some people have mentioned you shouldn’t dwell on your statistics but I love the numbers even if they are lower than most people’s, I still like to see what is going on.

I thought I would do a brief overview of what parts of Google’s Analytics service I use and possible explain to some people what it is they might see on their site’s reports. For those who do not know what Google’ Analytics I can sum it up pretty quick.

Google Analytics is a web based service that Google offers to track various web based statistics. All the user has to do is add a little Javascript code to the header of the page (every page must have this script on it) and it collects various tidbits of information and displays them to you in a beautiful format on Google’s Analytics website.

So when you first log into Google Analytics you are presented with a screen to select the domain you wish to view.  I have two other domains listed but I’ll show the screen captures for this one of course.

By default Google shows you the stats for the current week up till the previous day. This can be changed at will.

The overview summary is a nice when you need a quick look at what is going on. It shows you a nice history graph on your Pageviews and Hits, New Visitors and Returned Visitors in a lovely pie chart, the Geo Location of your visitors and a pie graph of the top referrals.

Next I usually take a peek at the Content Summary; this shows me the top 5 Entrances, Exits and Content.  Entrances are the pages that people enter my site on, the top being the root page at 225 entrances. Exits are where people leave my site from, again it seems that most people look at my front page and leave. Last part is the Content, what is the most popular page that people view. Next to the root of my website, My First MS Vista Ultimate Experience is currently the most popular.

The next section I like to visit is the Referring Source section. This section allows me to see the top 10 places people come from when visiting my site. This week Google is the top spot from where all my traffic comes from. I will show you how you can check what keywords people are using to get to your site.

I picked Digg as a source that I want to drill down to next. If you use the left menu options in the Google Analytics site to view the Referring Source (All Reports->Marketing Optimization->Visitor Segment Performance -> Referring Source) you can drill down and see from where locations within Digg people are finding your site.  The top section of Digg that I received the most visits from is /news/upcoming, followed by Digg’s search feature. You can see the other Digg stories I have that people have perhaps found a bit interesting too.

Now previously I said that Google is where most of my traffic comes from, well here is the breakdown of the top 10 keywords that people seem to find my site for.

As you can see the Viewsonic’s OptiQuest Q191wb is the number one. Which isn’t saying much either but it’s nice to see 148 keywords people have used to find my site. This could be handy in trying to get more traffic or looking at optimizing SEO techniques.

Next page I normally check periodically is what Browser people use to visit my site. It not a surprise but Firefox leads the pack with 59.81% of the people using it. You can also drill down to find out which versions of each browser people are using as well. There are also more options to see the environments which people are using to view your site with but I can tell you Firefox and Windows XP takes the cake with that one.

Well that pretty much sums up my daily adventures with Google Analytics. I hope that some of the information here has been a bit useful to you and perhaps clears up some things in regards to using one of Google’s services.  I am sure some people out there can also use the little bits of information shown here to perhaps give me advice in increasing my traffic as well.

I understand that the above images are not the best of quality and shrinking them down to a size that won’t take up too much space might ruin the quality a bit. Hopefully they give you a rough idea what you can look at while using Google Analytics.