Google Analytics Quiz

Acquisition Reports

Acquisition reports show you which channels (such as advertising or marketing campaigns) brought users to your site. This could include different marketing channels

Date range

At the top of every report is a date-range. This lets you set the time period in which you want to analyze report data. Click the date range to open up the date range selector.

Segment picker

At the top of the report, notice the segment picker. Segments are ways to look at a specific data set and compare metrics. We'll cover this in an advanced course. For now, notice that the default segment includes all of the Users that visited your site in the given date range.

Audience reports

Audience reports show you characteristics about your users like age and gender, where they're from, their interests, how engaged they were, whether they're new or returning users, and what technology they're using.

Behavior reports

Behavior reports show how people engaged on your site including which pages they viewed, and their landing and exit pages. With additional implementation, you can even track what your users searched for on your site and whether they interacted with specific elements.

Line graph

Below the segment picker are the different metrics of the Audience Overview report shown in different formats. The most prominent is a line graph that by default shows a data point for the number of users on each day over your selected date range.

Alert icon

Clicking the bell icon in the upper right shows you alerts about your Google Analytics properties and views

Alert menu

Clicking the bell icon shows you a list of all of your alerts. This may include data that is not collecting properly or a setting that needs optimizing. To close the Alerts menu, click anywhere on the screen outside of the alerts.

Conversion reports

Conversion reports allow you to track website goals based on your business objectives.

Custom Filters

Custom filters let you include or exclude hits from your data collection, format data to lowercase or uppercase, search and replace data collected in the hit. Custom filters accomplish this by matching a particular filter text-pattern that you identify.

Include filters

For example, let's say your business was making a push into mobile and only wanted to analyze mobile traffic in a specific view. You can set up a custom include-only filter on the view for Device Category and specify a value of Mobile. The filter will look at the criteria specified and match it to any relevant hits that Google Analytics has collected for that view. If the filter can't match the criteria, the filter will not be applied to that data.

Exclude filters

If there was data you wanted to specifically exclude such as Paid Search (or CPC) traffic, you can set a custom exclude filter that will exclude all paid traffic in a particular view, as well.

Duration Selector

If you wish to view this data more specifically, you can change the data points to show hourly, weekly, or monthly, as well. This can be especially helpful when looking at large date sets. If you are looking at data over a single day, the view will default to hourly.

Advanced filters

In addition to include, exclude, and lowercase filters, there are other advanced filters that allow you to remove, replace, and combine filter fields in more complex ways using what are called regular expressions. Regular expressions (or reg ex for short) are characters that you can use to identify matching text in order to trigger an action. A basic regular expression on a filter can be something as simple as a word or a more complicated combination of characters.

Graph Annotator

Notice the small arrow at the bottom of the line graph. Clicking on the arrow lets you annotate the graph with helpful notes to add business context to your data. Once you add an annotation, a small indicator will appear on the graph that can be viewed by other users with access to the view. Clicking any of the metrics below will show the data points for those metrics in the line graph above.

Predefined Filters

Predefined filters have already been created for you in Google Analytics, you just have to select the filter you wish to use. These allow you to include or exclude data based on traffic from the ISP domain, IP addresses, subdirectories, or the hostname, and designate how the filter will match that information.

Real time reports

Real-Time reports let you look at live user behavior on your website including information like where your users are coming from and if they're converting.

Admin

The Admin section contains all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions, tracking code, view settings, and filters.

Customization

The Customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business. We'll cover customization in an advanced course.

Language Dimension

The default dimension selected in the Audience Overview report is "Language." When Language is selected, note that the table to the right includes the top 10 languages and their sessions. You can also view top-10 metrics for Country and City. To view metrics about what technology people are using to view your site, click Browser, Operating System, and Service Provider.

Metrics

There are a number of helpful metrics beneath the line graph:

Date range selector

This opens up a calendar on the left where you can select your date ranges. When you change the date range, it affects all of the reports in your view. So you can switch between different reports without having to adjust the date range each time. You can choose between date ranges like last week, last calendar month, or last 30 days. But you can also set specific dates by clicking the start- and end-date fields and selecting calendar dates. If you'd like to select an entire month, simply click on the name of the month in the calendar to the left.

Search reports

To find a particular report, you can type the name of the report in the search bar at the top of the left-hand navigation.

Left hand navigation

To navigate between reports, you'll use the navigation on the left. Clicking on each of these sections will expose the reports that belong to each section.

New vs. Returning Users

To the right of the metrics is a pie chart illustrating the percentage of new vs. returning users.

Collapse left hand navigation

Use this pointer to shrink the navigation and provide more space for your reports.

Date Range Comparison

You can also compare data from two different date ranges by clicking "Compare to" and adding in the date ranges you wish to compare. This lets you to see how your business changed over time.

Lowercase and Uppercase filters

You can also use filters to normalize the data in your reports to make them easier to use. Google Analytics data isn't case sensitive, so pages in the All Pages report may show the same URL multiple times.

Metric Selector

You can change the metric shown from users to a different metric by selecting the drop-down menu under the Overview tab. Analytics lets you compare this to a second metric over the same time period by clicking "Select a metric".

Sessions

are the total number of sessions for the given date range.

Pageviews

are the total number of times pages that included your Analytics tracking code were displayed to users. This includes repeated viewings of a single page by the same user

Users

are the total number of users that visited for the given date range,

set up a Custom Dimension

go into Admin. Select the Property in which you want the dimension applied. Next, click Custom Definitions and then Custom Dimension. Then click New Custom Dimension.

Value

is an optional numerical value like the amount of time it takes a video to load or how much a specific event action is worth. You can use Value to assign a specific dollar amount when a specific action occurs.

Label

is an optional value used to further describe the element you're tracking like the name of a video. This can help you make your event reports more readable.

Action

is the action the user took when they initiated the event. If you were tracking when users click a video play-button, you might have a category called Videos with an associated action of Play.

Average session duration

is the average length of a session based on users that visited your site in the selected date range.

Pages per session

is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This also includes repeated viewings of a single page.

Percent of new session

is the percentage of sessions in your date range who are new users to your site.

Bounce rate

is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action.

vertical dots

let you edit user settings, send feedback to Google Analytics, or search Help articles

Category

lets you organize the events you track into groups. For your website, this might be Videos or Social Shares.

last icon

lets you switch between Google accounts or log out

user icon

lets you switch between different Analytics organizations or companies

Square dots

will enable you to switch between tools in the Google Analytics suite