Beginners Guide: How to Navigate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service from Google that allows you to analyze in-depth detail about the visitors on your website.

It provides valuable insights that can help you to shape the success strategy of your business no matter how big your business is.

However, Google Analytics can be difficult to understand and dissect for beginners. In this post, you’ll learn how to navigate basic Google Analytics with images!

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First, what can you do with Google Analytics?

You can check site visitors’ ages, where they from (counties), what links are clicked how many times, traffic sources to the site, etc. This information is helpful to understand your audience’s needs and improve the quality of services in demand. And also, it helps to create your media kits or blogging reports too!

How to navigate Google Analytics?

Ok, now let’s check your month-to-month users and month-to-month pageviews. First of all, sign in to your Google Analytics account.

Here is what you see when you log in:

On the left side, you’ll see the menu bar. Click Audience > Overview.

Then you’ll see the audience overview. Click the right upper corner of the date section.

You can choose a date range. In this tutorial, we are looking for “month-to-month” users and pageviews. So, select February 1st to February 28th. Then, click Apply.

Now, you see February 1st to February 28th users, sessions, Pageviews, etc.

SEO tips: “Users” is the number of actual people that have visited the website. “Pageviews” is the number of pages that people have viewed in total.

Say I visited your site on January 1. While I’m there, I visit the homepage, about page, and contact page. If I’m the only one who visited your site on January 8, here’s what your analytics looks like:

• Users: 1
• Pageviews 3

The next day on January 2, I visit the homepage, about page, and contact page again. Now here’s what your analytics looks like:

• Users: 2
• Pageviews 6

Let’s move on to Demographics and analyze your audience!

Check the left side menu bar again and under Audience, click Demographics > Overview.

You’ll see Demographics Overview. It is the data of your site visitor’s location, age, and gender. As a default, the location only shows the countries where visitors are from. (NOT home address)

Last part! Let’s check the traffic sources. Traffic sources mean where site visitors came from such as organic search, social media, backlinks, etc.

Once again, check the left side menu bar, and under Acquisition click Overview. You’ll see your traffic sources reports.

Organic means search engines like Google and Yahoo. Social means social media channels. You can check the exact numbers of traffics from each social media platform. If site visitors arrived on your site either by typing your website URL into a browser or through browser bookmarks, it will count as Direct. Referrals are like backlinks that are not from search engines and social media.

Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

If your website is built by WordPress, great news!

WordPress has tons of Google Analytics plugins to download. Some of the plugins are super easy to use (:

I use MonsterInsights (it’s free or paid), and I like it a lot!

MonsterInsights has made it extremely easy to connect websites to my Google Analytics accounts. I didn’t have to type the API key or tweak HTML code to embed the tracking code. That’s a big plus! MonsterInsights also made Initial settings easier and faster. Even though the free version, the dashboard is very user-friendly.

Related Posts:

• MonsterInsights Review 2020: Best WordPress Google Analytics Plugin
• MonsterInsights: Install Google Analytics to your WordPress site in 3 Easy Steps

Wrapping Up

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to grow your business website. It’s a bit complicated at first, but you can learn little by little (: