Google Analytics Basic Instructions

This documentation is a basic introduction to using Google Analytics to analyze usage in Pika.

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Table of Contents

Basic Navigation

Google Analytics website - http://www.google.com/analytics/

Go to the SIGN IN at the top right of the site. Click on Google Analytics.  The sign-in is associated with a Google Account or Google email

Open

Open

Click on All Web Site Data to see the statistics for your website. This will also give a brief summary of Sessions, Avg. Session Duration and Bounce Rate.

Clicking on the All Web Site Date will link to the main dashboard.  

The landing page is Audience Overview.

The system typically generates statistics for the last 30 days from the date someone signs into the system.

Clicking on the dropdown arrow will give the calendar to change the date for the statistics.  The date range can be changed to Custom to allow for picking a specific date range.

The calendar can also be used to show a comparison to a previous period. When doing a comparison, make sure to change the date to cover equal amounts of days for each month.  

The comparison will give a chart for those dates that can be changed to Hourly, Day, Week, or Month.

This will also show if statistics are going up or down for each month of the comparison.

Here are all the links with statistics for a web page.  Unless you know what they mean, it might be hard to understand the numbers.  In order to understand the numbers, we need to know the definition for each one.  

Hovering over the words will show the definition.

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Basic Definitions

Sessions – Total number of Sessions within the date range.  A session is the period of time a user is actively engaged with the website, app, etc.  All usage data (Screen Views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.

Users – Users that have had at least one session within the selected date range.  Includes both new and returning users.

Pageviews – is the total number of pages viewed.  Repeated views of a single page are counted.

Pages/Session – (Average Page Depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a session.  Repeated views of a single page are counted. 

Avg. Session Duration – The average length of a Session.

Bounce Rate – is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left a site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

New Sessions – An estimate of the percentage of first-time visits.

When looking at a date range, the Sessions equal the number of times that a single user has visited any page on the website. In this example, 399 Users visited this site and viewed the site a total of 1,147 times (from January 11, 2016 – February 10, 2016). Every time a page loads that is what is counted as Pageviews.

Pages/Session are the average numbers of pages that users view during their session.  The Avg. Session Duration is the amount of time they spent on the site during a session. Bounce Rate is the percentage of users that visit the site and only look at one page. This would be the page they landed or entered on.

New Sessions are the amount of 1st-time users going to the site.  This can also be seen in a pie chart to the right of the page.

Other useful data is at the bottom of the page.  This lists Demographics, System, and Mobile information.  The default will be the Language.  There is also a link to view the full report which will match any link that is currently highlighted (for example Languages).  Clicking on each link gives the data for each one.  Just a reminder, the data or statistics will change with each new date range.

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Acquisition Overview

Acquisition shows how people are accessing a website.

• Direct – They know the URL.  They may have it bookmarked. They are not searching for it on the web.

• Referral – This is when someone else has linked to your website.  

• Organic Search - This is searching by going to a search engine like Google.

• Social – This is the one to watch if you are posting a lot on Social Media.

Clicking on Organic Search will show all the search terms that people use to find a website.  “Not provided” has to do with the privacy settings of the users.

Clicking on  Referral and Social will also show the search terms or ways that people use to find a website.

Here are examples for Social and Referral.

The amount of results that are shown can be changed with the drop-down located at the bottom right of the page.

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Behavior Overview

Behaviors shows the more popular pages on a website.  

This looks very similar to the Audience Overview but shows the very top viewed pages.  This is useful to find out if anyone is using a page.   The / if is for the homepage.    

Clicking on view full report located in the bottom right corner will show the statistics broken down by page.

There is a search box at the top to help find the pages you want to see.

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Real-Time Overview

Real Time shows what pages users are viewing in real-time and can be an interesting snapshot in time of how your users are navigating the catalog.

This shows the active page or pages, and the location of the people who are viewing the pages.

It also tracks the pageviews over time as well.  Hovering over the time shows how many pages were viewed during the time period.

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