Finding your way around

Account/Property/View switcher

If you have multiple accounts, properties, or views set up, you can easily switch between them by clicking on the pulldown menu with the title of your View in the upper-left corner.

When you open up the account picker, you can select by account, property, or view. You can also search any of these by name. To close the Account picker, click anywhere on the screen outside of the picker.

Alert icon

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

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.

Settings, feedback, and help

At the top right of your Analytics view are several icons:

The square dots will enable you to switch between tools in the Google Analytics suite
The vertical dots let you edit user settings, send feedback to Google Analytics, or search Help articles
The user icon lets you switch between different Analytics organizations or companies
And the last icon lets you switch between Google accounts or log out

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.

Customization

The Customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business.

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.

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.

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.

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 such as:

“Organic” (or unpaid search)
“CPC” (“cost per click” or paid search)
“Referral” (traffic that comes from another website)
“Social” (from a social network)
or “Other,” (a group of low volume traffic sources)

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.

Conversion Reports

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

Admin

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Metrics

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

“Sessions” are the total number of sessions for the given date range.
“Users” are the total number of users that visited 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.
“Pages per session” is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This also includes repeated viewings of a single page.
“Average session duration” is the average length of a session based on users that visited your site in the selected date range.
“Bounce rate” is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action.
“Percent of new sessions” is the percentage of sessions in your date range who are new users to your site.

New vs. Returning Users

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

Dimensions and Metrics

Clicking into the dimensions on the bottom left of the report, will allow you to see the top 10 dimensions and metrics in each category.

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.