Google Analytics For Dummies: Micro Tutorial

Analytics is a powerful web site traffic analysis software, one of the most complete and powerful i never used, but at the same time it can be a quite difficult  for the newbie.

I realize that many users have some trouble in order to get simple reports such as search engine keyword list, or most viewed web pages with Google Analytics. Some example;

• Referring web sites
• Referring pages
• Search engine hits
• Most popular keywords

and so on. This is a micro-guide to Analytics for essential usage with some little hints and tips.

How to get a referring web sites list

Check the left menu and select:

Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source

You’ll see a list of  referring sites on the right side of the screen grouped by domain of the current week   (ou can change it,l et’s see it later ) . Take care, search engines will be shown here among others referring sites.

Specific referring URLs

Click on the red bullet close to the domain name in order to show more informations about the source domain, like the specific URL and others useful informations.

Search Engine Hits

Many users are not able to find their most popular keywords inside Analytics. Here it is;

Marketing Optimization > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion

That’s it. We get a list of  the search engine hits grouped by domain. You can also draw a trend chart related to each engine; just click on the red bullet to open a submenu an click on: Data Over Time. Take a look on others items; there a lot of interesting reports.

Popular Keywords

Now let’s see the keywords of a single engine: click on the [+] engine bullet and that’s it!. Also in this case you can draw  a trend chart for each keyword clickin on the red bullet close to it, in the same way you did for search engines domains.

Hints and tricks

You can change the time range of each list/chart shown on screen in this way;

1. Click on the yellow icon on the top right of the calendar table
2. Select the start date on the left
3. Select the end date on the right
4. Click on “Apply range>>” below

Another useful feature of Analytics is the daily trend which can be really useful to discover the best hour to publish new content on your website. It’s enough to click on a single day into the calendar panel in order to display the traffic trend on hourly basis.

So, it’s not exactly the Analytics Bible, but it’s enough to start. Now it’s up to you.
Google Analytics is a free service. Register here.