Making Money with Google Analytics: Basic Interface

You’ve started your online business, your website is live and running, and you’ve made all the necessary effort to provide your audience with good, high-quality content – now it’s time to find out what’s actually working for you, and that's just wasting your time and money. Interestingly, as much as 80% of the success that you receive from your online marketing efforts, could come from about 20% of the actual activities. If you want to make more out of your marketing and improve your website, then you need to figure out exactly where your customers are coming from, and what they do on your website once they have arrived. Analytics give you the tools that you need to pinpoint the most important information you can access, and optimize your activity.

The Latest Edition

The latest version of Google Analytics comes in the form of Analytics 5. Perhaps the most popular feature in this edition is the use of custom dashboards, which allows you to create dashboards for your site that measure and analyze every metric that you’re specifically interested in. What’s more, you even get to decide how that information is displayed to you. You might decide, for example, to look at your views in the form of a graph, your views by country in the form of a pie-chart, and so on.

Dealing with the Basic Interface

The first thing you will need to approach when you’re learning how to use Google Analytics is the basic interface. Accessing the report that is given for your website will direct you towards the Visitors Overview screen – a page that differs somewhat to the previous version of Analytics, where you were shown a general screen providing information about content and traffic sources. At the head of the report, you will be able to see a chart that shows the details of your traffic patterns over the last month. There’s a drop-down selection nearby that you can use to change the date of this graph, and show results from previous months. You can even choose to compare two date ranges, for example, if you want to see the results for your website in April, in comparison to results from December the year before. For the chart, you will be able to make annotations for specific days. For example, imagine that you had a certain review for your product on a high-quality industry website on a particular day – you could include an annotations for that day so that you can refer to it later on when there’s an inevitable spike in traffic. You can also use annotations to explain sudden traffic drops – for example, during times when your website goes down for a couple of hours. On the left of the screen, you’ll see the navigation for your main report. From here, you will be able to access more detailed reports about your visitors or switch around to see detailed information and overviews about content, conversions and traffic sources. Along the top, there is more navigation, including an additional link to conversions, and a link to custom reports.