Google Analytics Beginners Tutorial

hey everybody it's josh here in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to read and understand google analytics now up to this point you've probably seen that most of my tutorials are geared around divi and wordpress this tutorial is actually going to be applicable to anyone who has google analytics installed on their website so we're going to cover the basics google analytics is very robust but i'm going to show you basically what i use it for and i'm going to just give you a basic overview of how to read page views check out stats see where your traffic's coming from and just mainly give you kind of a rundown of the main things you need to know so i just previously released a tutorial on how to set google analytics up so if you haven't seen that you don't know how to do that please refer back to that but once you have your account set up you're going to go to your login screen which i'll make sure i have a link to on the show notes and you're going to click sign in and then you're going to click analytics okay and once you're signed into your analytics account you're going to see a general overview of whatever site you're on currently so you can click the top left here and you're going to see all of your accounts i have three accounts under this gmail that i have associated with my stuff so i have my main site my josh hall dot co i have my tutorial site my demo zone so i'm on my josh hall.com site and i'm actually going to give you guys a walkthrough of my page views and so you're going to see real time stats real traffic and everything that i've done up to this point so what you're going to see initially is an overview so you'll see generally this shows like the last seven days but you can set this to maybe last 90 days you can see who's active on your site right now so for example i'm on my home page and if i click to my tutorials page check this out i can click to my tutorials and i go back to my analytics this should change here very quickly so again you see me going from the home page to the tutorials page and then you can see right there it just shifted it it showed that there's a user on my tutorials page we scroll down you'll see some other stuff you can see some basics you can see what popular pages are over the past few days there's quite a few things you can look at here but i want to show you kind of where the the meat and potatoes is for all of the google analytics stuff and that is over here on the left under reports we have some main areas here i'll say by way of preface that i don't even look at conversions you can do a lot with google analytics like with targeting and ads and things like that but i just want to show you the basics of how to look at page views and all that stuff so initially you can go to real time which again is basically what i just showed you there you can see who's looking at your site and it'll actually show you on the map so you can see my computer right here is looking at the front or the tutorials page on my site that's generally all i look at for real time but let me show you the big three there is audience acquisition and behavior another way you can explain these is audience who is looking at your site acquisition is how they're getting to your site and behavior is what they're doing so what we're going to do is we're going to actually start from the bottom up we're going to start with behavior this is one of my favorite sections of google analytics because this shows us our page view so if i click into site content you can see it gives me an option for all pages so we're going to click that okay and with all pages click i don't know why they bury it there i don't know why they make it so hard to get to because it took me forever to figure this out because i didn't have any formal training but all pages is going to show you all of the pages of your website so from here what i recommend doing is setting your date so you can see right here that this is just set for the past week but let me do maybe two months out i'm recording this on december the 27th let's look at november through december we're going to click apply and this will show me all the traffic and again so i'm you know i'm being transparent with you i'm showing you all the traffic that i've had on my site my josh hall.com this is what's really really useful is you can see all of your most popular pages if you see this dash right here this backslash that means that's your homepage so you can see that i have over 3000 views on my home page in this period right here from november 1st december 27th you can see that tutorials are my next most popular page then products and then you can see all the tutorials from there and other pages now i could go down here and i could look at more pages as well i could set it to 50 and i could see my top 50 most popular pages all through there now let me give you a walk through the next most important section which are these finer details so there's a big difference between page views and unique page views and the way i understand it and again i'm not an expert on google analytics but i'm going to kind of tell you how i understand it unique page views are per device so let's say i'm on one device and i look at three different pages and then i go back to those pages and keep on looking well it's only going to show me three unique page views it might show 10 or 15 actual page views because my same device is scrolling around those pages again but it's only going to be unique page views here so we really are more interested in unique page views as to the initial page views but it's good to know you know you might get recurring visitors and returning visitors and that's where page views are going to stack up more if you get more readers on you know if somebody is coming back to my same tutorial multiple times it's going to show up here and not here average time on page is obviously how much time they're spending there i don't really worry about entrances at all bounce rate and exit are very important so again no expert here but the way i understand bounce rate is that bounce rate is when people come to your site and they look at one page and they're gone now if you have a landing page style site like just a one pager and they go on there and your only option is to fill out a contact form or to call then it's not a big deal you know you're probably going to want people to either call and get off your site but in my case i generally don't want people to look at just one page i want them to look at more blog posts more tutorials ideally more products and things like that so i can see that i have a bounce rate on my front page of 41 that means people are going to my front page and they're exiting the site they're bouncing off that's not too bad i don't know what industry standard is but if you're getting a bounce rate of like 80 or 90 that's probably not good again unless you're just a one-page website but if you have a big site and you want a lot of traffic that's probably not a good bounce rate percentage exit however is when people are moving around your site and then they exit that page you know a lot of times you'll see exit percentage high on a contact page because people are going throughout the site then they contact that business and then they exit so that's basically what that is exit is when people are going through numerous pages and then they end off on that page so again you can look at your percentages through all their all those as well so this is probably my most fascinating and favorite part of google analytics again behavior what people are doing go to site content all pages now one thing other thing i want to show you here too is that and again you can just change the date so i could look at let's let's see i launched my site on august 16th let's look all together i can click apply and then boom you can see all the page views all of the details here and you can get a better feel for the year and it'll show you here you know how many page views in the spike so if you do a big campaign you can see generally a spike of traffic so the other cool thing i wanted to show you here is if you click behavioral flow this is going to show you generally what people are doing when they land on your website so you can see here that a lot of people are hitting my home page and from there they're let's look at this one actually let's look at starting pages a lot of people are hitting home page then they're going to my tutorials then they're going to products then they're going to my elegant themes blog series they're going to sign ups and different things like that so this actually will show you the average percentage of people on your site and of course you can look at this in more detail so those are the main two things i look at in behavioral flow let's move to acquisition acquisition is how they're getting to your site so i often will look at channels and what channels are now again i've set the date for when i launched my site so i'm looking at you know the whole year until now and you can see all these spikes too you can see you know when you have kind of spikes of traffic so i can see that the majority of my traffic is coming from social media some is coming from direct which would be when people type in josh hall.com referral is if it's coming from another site and we'll drill down into these in a little bit and an organic search is if somebody is typing maybe josh hall divvy or josh hall web design or something like that so let's look into these a little further okay so i click social and i can see that the majority of my traffic is coming from facebook so quite a bit from youtube and then there's other little outlets that again i don't really utilize at this point so i'm not surprised that those you know don't have more let's go back to channels and let's take a look at referrals because this is the other big one if i click referral this is going to show me the other websites that have actually directed traffic to my site so you can see that this site divi theme examples has referred a lot of traffic over thank you guys for that my business site in transit studios of course has a lot of traffic coming from coming over from that and then of course elegant themes who i blog for you know getting quite a few hits from there and you can see these other sites here that again maybe i have links on or people have heard about the site and aren't going over so i got to thank everyone here who's uh sending traffic my way so that's really all i look at under acquisition again acquisition is how people are getting to the site behavior was what they're doing and now we're going to look into audience which is who is looking at our site this has some of my very favorite sections of google analytics and we're going to start off with let's to go ahead and do geo because this is my favorite if you click under geo and you can click location you can see here it's going to highlight all of your traffic and it's going to show you where the majority of your traffic is coming from so you can see most of my traffic is coming from the us being that i'm in the u.s a lot from the uk several from canada australia and then it kind of drills down from there now this is what's even cooler is not only can you see it down here but you can highlight over these and you can click into it so if i click into the states here i can see the darker states have the most traffic so a lot of traffic here quite a bit of traffic in texas a lot in california quite a bit in new york now what's even cooler is it shows you here bi-state and then let's go one step further check this out if i click into ohio i can see all of my traffic by device so this is obviously where i'm located where you're seeing the biggest circle but every time somebody looks at my site from a device google analytics is picking it up kind of creepy right it's crazy how they can track all this stuff but this shows me every single county and every city that i get traffic from so one thing that's really important so of course i live in grove city it's showing me a lot there one thing that's important about this is if you're doing this for a client and let's say they're marketing around their state well if they do postcards or certain digital marketing campaigns to certain cities or counties you can look at that here and you can see what's working you can see how much traffic is being you know driven to the site so this is one of my favorite things about google analytics is to look at geo and you can look at all that now let's look at demographics you can go to overview and you do have to enable this when you set up a google analytics site or a site on your google linux account you do need to enable demographics so i can see here that the age range of the typical user from my site is mainly between 25 and 34 and then just below that 35 to 44. then it kind of goes down from there and you can see that the majority of my traffic is male with a smaller percentage being female right there so that's a really useful one and the other thing i want to show you here is under technology you can look under browser and os and this is going to show you what browsers are checking out your site so again year to date since i've set up my site most people thank goodness are looking at chrome which is what i use and is what is most reliable the next most popular is safari so where this is useful is if i do a css effect and it looks great on chrome when it doesn't look good on safari i need to to be remindful that you know i've got a lot of people still looking on safari on the site next is firefox and then of course the other ones are down here thank goodness internet explorer is only 114 out of the whole year so that's a good one to know the last thing i want to show you here and this is you can look at your mobile which is really really cool so this will show you how much of your traffic is desktop as opposed to mobile and tablet now for me it's very it's not surprising that i'm getting mostly desktop traffic and i prefer that because i'm selling products because i'm doing tutorials where people are most likely on their laptops and their main computers of course i'm going to be getting a lot of desktop traffic mobile is the next highest which again you're going to want to make sure your site is mobile friendly and where this is really critical is let's say you do a site for a pizza shop well they're probably going to have more mobile traffic than desktop so you want to make sure you know you can look at the percentage here and say you know what maybe i need to tweak the mobile design to be more important than the desktop and then tablet i found it's funny across most all the sites that i manage most sites have less and less tablet traffic so that's kind of interesting but that's a really good thing to know and then from here you can actually look at the devices even further so it gets even more creepy you can see here that the majority of my traffic mobile traffic is on iphones and ipads and then you can see it drills down from here and you can see certain versions of each phone here and how important and how popular they are so those are some of the main areas that i look at that's really all i look at guys in the way of google analytics most of my clients just want to know you know who's looking at their site how they got there and then what they're doing when they're on the site last thing i want to show you here is if you click down here to actually let me um let me click off this you can go down here to admin if you watched my setup video you saw how to add a site which is right here you can go to your administrative area you're going to click that to set up a new account the other thing that you can do is let's say you want to share this property or share maybe you don't want to share the whole account but you just want to share the website to a colleague or something so they can look at the analytics i do this for a lot of my clients if they want to be able to log in and see their analytics oh i will actually set them up as a user and you can do that right here you can just go to user management and then from here you can just click add you can see i've got my other gmail associated with this and i can add a user right here by email this will notify them and then you can give them certain permissions so it's very very useful and as long as they have certain permissions checked then they'll be able to log in and see the same analytics so guys that's just a walkthrough of how to read and understand google analytics i hope this has helped again this is just kind of scratching the surface but generally this is what i do i just look at real time stats sometimes and then generally you know who's on my site how they got there and i my personal favorite is to look under site content under behavior here and to look at the pages to see what pages are the most popular so hope this has helped guys if you have any questions let me know otherwise enjoy finally hopefully being able to understand google analytics cheers everybody [Music] you

Channel: Josh Hall

Views: 344,342

Rating: 4.9132361 out of 5

Keywords: Google Analytics, Elegant Themes, Divi, Josh Hall, Web Design, Read Google Analytics

Id: P3V01bDbIR0

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2017