Google Analytics: Trying to make sense of it

Google analytics is an amazing free tool that is often under utilised. You certainly don’t need to pay for a web analytics tool unless you are using Google analytics to it’s maximum.

Dashboard
The first place to start making sense of things clearly has to be the dashboard. A dashboard is a one page view of some of the most important information that is relevant to your business. You might create a dashboard for a standard report you want to run every week. When this report is created it can automatically be sent to relevant people. Creating custom dashboards is quite straight forward.

Dashboards got a much needed overhaul in the new Google Analytics. Users can now create up to 20 personalized dashboards, developing widgets and formats that make the most sense for them or their company.

In the case of my dashboard, I have chosen to insert the location of the visits,which as we can see are in the South East of England, I have also put in the different type of browsers that have click on my blog. Lastly there is a section for the average visit duration, which is shown by a timeline. This all can be changed regarding on what you want to be on your dashboard.

Annotations

When you view a traffic report over the last year and you see some spikes or dips how do you know what they are related to? You may have a memory like Einstein but for the rest of us we need reminding.Google allows us to tag charts so we can review these at a later stage and understand what happened at that stage.To put in an ‘annotation’ just click a part of the graph and type in the information.
Lastly if there is anything you may need help with doing on your analytics page e.g. Integrating AdSense then visit here