Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve
Can you tell us a little about what that is because I think most people have no idea.
Can you use some screen shots to explain it?
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Sure thing Steve, I have taken some screen shots and will try and explain to everyone whats going on in both screen shots.
Lets start off with what happens when you first bring up your websites stats.
- The Dashboard
http://www.lcowebdesign.com/analytics-dashboard.jpg
So the first thing up top is an orange bar which allows you to switch between stats for different websites, I'm assuming most of you wont have this but I have a number of sites I track stats on.
Next is your navigation menu on the left with links to different reports.
- Visitor Graph
The visit graph is the first list of stats on the main dashboard. It simply shows how many visits you have received in the past 30 days or so. You can hover over any of the blue circles to show the number of visits for a specific date.
- Site Usage
This shows stats like visits, pageviews, avg number of page views per each visit, bounce rate, average time on site, what percent are new visits. All stats are over a 30 day period.
- Visitors Overview
Almost the same as the visits graph except it shows the number of unique visitors.
- Map Overlay
This feature it kind of cool and may be useful for lawn care business owners. It shows where the visitors are coming from. You can bring up a bigger version and get much more detailed information about where your visitors are coming from. You can see by country, state and even cities!
- Traffic Sources Overview
A simple pie chart showing you where your visitors are coming from. It also gives exact numbers and percentages. As you can see most of my traffic comes from search engines and direct traffic (people who time in my url into the address bar).
- Content Overview
This shows your top 5 pages with the most page views and what percent of page views they have to your whole site.
- Traffic Sources
http://www.lcowebdesign.com/analytic...ic-sources.jpg
Okay so the first two features are pretty much the same thing from the dashboard so I don't need to explain those again. But these other two features are very helpful with SEO.
- Top Traffic Sources
This shows your top 5 traffic sources, you can of course click "view full report" to get the whole list. Now if you click lets say "Google" which for that site of mine has sent 7,315 visitors over the past 30 days, it will give you a full list of what search terms where searched for to find your site. It also shows for each search term the number of visits, page views per visit, avg time on site, % of new visits, and bounce rate.
Now right there I'm sure you can understand how useful that tool can be. You see which search terms are bringing in traffic and which terms and bringing in traffic that's actually staying on your site.
- Top Keywords
This is the same deal as above, except it combines all the search engine traffic results instead of showing results for each individual search engine.
These are just some of the cool features of Google Analytics. I hope this has helped you all understand a little bit more.
Please note that those images were edited and are not showing accurate keywords listings or page listings. I did not want to give away the site those stats are really for.
Thanks, Matt