Google Analytics is a great tool in helping you understand what is happening with your website and how people are interacting with it. We help you setup your own Google Analytics account after your website is live. To access your Google Analytics account you can sign in via www.google.com/analytics using your Google Account or Gmail address we added in for you.

We assist all of our clients in setting up a Google Analytics account when their new websites go live on the Internet. If you do not have one setup please contact your Account Manager to arrange the setup of one for you. Alternatively, you may link your existing Google Analytics account with your new website.

Once you sign in you can click on your website and follow the link to view your website data. The default report that opens is the Audience Overview Report. If you do not see this report, you can open it from the left-hand side navigation under the Standard Reports > Audience > Overview.

A. Audience Overview Report

The first screen you are presented with is your general visitor summary (Audience Overview report). This gives you the information you need in terms of the visitor activity, that is:

1. How people visited the website (Unique visitors)
2. How many visited more than once (Total visits)
3. How many pages they viewed (Pageviews)
4. How many pages they browsed on average (Pages / Visit)
5. How long they stayed on the site (Avg. Visit Duration)
6. How many left the site after the first page they visited (Bounce Rate)

You can interact with the stats on this page to learn more about your visitors. Google provides an explanation for each of the stats shown on the page.

You can also change the date range in to top right area to select a specific date range (e.g. last month, or last quarter, etc) to understand past or long term visitor trends. This is something you specify in this section or any other section in the Google Analytics reports.

The data presented here will give you an idea on how much traffic you are receiving on your website and you can use benchmark data from when your website went live, or even previous months / quarters to see if there is a general increase or decrease in traffic to your website.

B. Location Demographics

In the right hand pane you can access "Location" under Audience > Geo.

This will bring up a profile of your visitors from the different countries in the world.

You can click on the country (e.g. Australia) to view which States people visited from. You will be presented with statistics seen before in the Audience Overview report but filtered specifically for the states in the list.

On this page you can change the Primary Dimension to “City” by clicking on the title. This will give you a breakdown of the cities with stats directly related to it. This will help you analyse how much of your traffic was local, interstate or international.

You can use this information to create other content on your website to suit the audience in the location you are targetting.

C. Visitor Flow Report

In the right hand pane you can access "Visitor Flow" under Audience. This is a more complex report that demonstrates how people interact with the pages of your website.

The country from which the site gets the most visits is listed at the top. This also indicates the number of visitors from that country.

This can then branch out to a couple of group of pages under “Starting Pages”.

These are generally the homepage and other internal content pages that people have found on the Internet or accessed directly.

You can then click on the blocks to select the “Group Details”. This will give you stats on the most popular pages that people are accessing directly or via search engines.

You can click on the little icon next to the link in the Group Details to view the page being referred to. From here you can investigate the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd interactions after the Starting Page to gain an understanding of which pages people are looking at most after arriving on your website.

You also click on the block and select “Highlight traffic through here” to visually see the flow of visitors.

This report will highlight to you if visitors are able to get to relevant information quickly. If your most important website content is in the second or third interaction then you may need to restructure your website navigation or homepage to allow visitors to get to it quicker.

D. Traffic Sources Overview Report

You can access the Traffic Sources Overview report in the left pane by clicking on Acquisition > Overview

This report gives you the breakdown of how your website visitors found your site, that is:

1. Using a search engine (Search Traffic - Google or any others)
2. Using a site that links to yours (Referral Traffic, e.g. Yellow Pages, Facebook or other websites)
3. Typing in the address of your website in the browser or using a bookmark (Direct Traffic)
4. People accessing your site through an ad campaign (Google AdWords)

This section will also show you a summary of keywords people used in search engines to find you. However, you can investigate this further in a more specific report (Search Overview Report)

Use this report to track variances compared to previous months / quarters to see if your search traffic is increasing or if a online campaign elsewhere is result in more referrals.

E. Referrals Report

You can access the Referrals report in the left pane by clicking on Acquisition > All Referrals

In this report you can get the full list of sites that have referred visitors on to your website and it shows you the associated visitor statistics from each site. This can help you analyse which referral arrangements are working best for your website.

In the Primary Dimension section you can click on “Landing Page” to see which pages are being linked to most. You also may click on the little icons next to the links to view the pages being listed in the report.

The referral report can help you make decisions on which pages / content / product / service needs a boost to maximise the benefits of the referrals. It can also help analyse which links or campaigns on other website are resulting in the most referrals.

F. Search Overview Report

You can access the Search Overview report in the left pane by clicking on Acquisiton > Keywords > Organic

This report gives you data on how people accessed your website via the search engines.

You can click on “Keyword” in the Primary Dimension section to show you which keywords were used by visitors to access your website.

This will give you an insight into the most popular keywords visitors actually used and it will give you an idea as to whether or not your keyword strategy for your website is successful or not.

In the list if you see a “(Not Provided)” keyword this mean that users have activated their browser settings or private browsing sessions where their search are not being tracked. These are likely to be your most common keywords that visitors search with to get to your website.

It is good to compare the search terms from previous months or quarters to see the variance in terms and where the positive or negative changes are. You can then also review the Search Engine Optimization report to determine if you need to alter your strategy or pick better keywords or produce more content on high ranking terms.

G. Search Engine Optimization Report

You can access the Search Engine Optimization report in the left pane by clicking on Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries

This report is generated from the keywords in the content in your site, so in effect this gives you a report on the performance of your keywords in the search engines.

It lists the keywords and gives you information on:

1. How many times your website appeared in search results (Impressions)
2. How many of those clicked on the link
3. The average position of your website of that specific search term (Average Position)
4. What % of people visited your website from the link (Click Through Rate)

This is particularly helpful in working out whether or not your target search terms are working for you and if they are ranking in the first page in Google. An average rank beyond 10^th would indicate that you are beyond the first page in Google and that your website is not being found easily.

It is a good idea to compare past data to evaluate the movements in the average positions of your chosen keywords. A positive variance is welcome but a negative variance should raise questions about your content and whether or not it is optimised enough.

If you require further guidance with this or help with more advanced topics then we will need to refer you to specialist. An initial consultation may be free however costs may apply for this if you choose to pursue specialist assistance for search optimisation and reporting.

1. How do I get a Google Account or Gmail address?
2. How do I submit my website to Google?

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