How to Use Google Analytics to Understand Your Website Traffic

Google Analytics is a free and very powerful program that allows you to analyze various aspects of your website traffic. All you need to do is enter a special code into your website in order for your traffic to start tracking. Your stats update on a daily basis and you can view the details inside your online account. This guide will show you how to use many of its main features.

Step 1: Understand Your Report Overview

When you log into your account, click on the "View Report" link beside the website you want to see. This will take you to view your statistics.

Then you will see an overview of your statistics. The default period is the past month and you can edit the reporting period using the drop down menu at the top right of the screen. Click "Apply" when you've chosen your report period.

You can also customize your overview by clicking the "All Visits" tab near the top right corner of the page.

Once you click it, you will have options to choose certain types of visitors and even create your own custom segments. You can choose to view returning visitors, paid search traffic, non-paid search traffic, etc. Click "Apply" when you're done.

When you have chosen your segment (or left it as the default of "All Visits"), you can take a look at your overview. Here is what you can expect to see near the top:

This is a graphic overview of your website visitors for the report period. You can mouseover to see details of a certain day. In the above example, we see that there were 998 visits on September 16.

Next you'll see an overview of your site usage.

Let's define some of the terminology above:

• Visits: The number of times a visitor has been to your site in a 30 minute period (called a "session"). If a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more, if they have more activity later, it will be counted as a new session. If a visitor leaves your site and comes back within 30 minutes, it is counted as the same session.
• Pageviews: The number of pages that has been viewed on your site.
• Pages/Visit: The number of pages viewed, on average, per visit.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visits that viewed only a single page on your site. A "bounce" is a visitor who comes to your page and then leaves without viewing any other pages.
• Avg. Time on Site: This is the average time a visitor spends on your site. It is shown in hours:minutes:seconds.
• % of New Visits: This is the percentage of all visitors in the report period that visited your site for the first time.

Note, you can click through any of those statistics shown above to view a more detailed report.

Continued in Part 2 next week