Capitulo 1. Fundamentación teórica
1. Familia y realidad social. consideraciones teóricas en su estudio
After opening Google Analytics, you can choose to view a number of different statistics. In the sidebar on the left, you can click on Real-Time. This will show you how many visitors are on your website right at this moment. You can see which devices people use (desktop, mobile phone), which pages are viewed and from which location your visitors come. Looking at Real-
Time statistics is fun, because you can monitor
how many visitors are at your site and what they’re looking at. But keep in mind that this is all it is: data on what your visitors are doing right now. This isn’t really useful for anything besides fun, and maybe checking if the post you just published is getting some immediate visitors.
Audience
The next tab in Google Analytics is Audience. The audience section is Google Analytics’ attempt to give you an idea of what kind of audience your site has. The Demographics and
Interests tabs tell you what gender and age
your visitors are, and what they’re interested in. However, there’s obviously no way Google Analytics can be sure about who’s behind a pc, tablet or smartphone, so don’t read too much into this.
So lets talk about the useful data you can be sure about: the Behavior, Technology and Mobile tabs. These tabs tell you whether a visitors is on your site for the first time or how many times they’ve been on your site before. And it will tell you what kind of device and software they used to view your site. This is all information that you can use to improve your site. For instance, if you have a lot of traffic from smartphones, you’d better have a decent responsive website!
There are two menu items we didn’t mention yet: Custom and Users Flow. The Custom tab is there for any custom dimensions or variables you might’ve made. This is definitely for more advanced users, so we’re not going into it here. The Users Flow can be a great tool to get a general idea and quick overview of how your visitors move through your site.
Yoast Tip
Look at pie charts for a quick and understandable overview.
Acquisition
The Acquisition tab is the tab where you can find out where your visitors are actually coming from. It gives you all the websites that are refer- ring to your website, including search engines such as Google. Google Analytics splits these referrals into 7 different so called Channels:
1 Direct 2 Organic Search 3 Referral 4 Social 5 Display 6 Email 7 (Other)
The Direct is exactly that: visitors that type your URL directly into their browser. Organic Search is all the traffic coming from search engines.
Referrals are all websites referring to your site that aren’t social media.
Social is for all the traffic coming from social media. Display is for all the traffic coming from ads you have on other sites. Email is obviously for traffic coming from email campaigns. And (Other) is for campaigns you’ve created yourself.
By organizing it in these channels, you can actually quickly see where most of your traffic is coming from. For more detailed information, you can simply click any one of these channels. If you do this with the
Organic Search channel, you’ll notice the ‘np’ in front of your URLs. NP
stands for ‘Not Provided’, as Google no longer gives you any keyword data. This means you can’t see what people searched for to end up on that specific page.
All the other menu items below the Acquisition section are primarily for advanced users, so we won’t go into them here. But do click through them a bit just to see what else you can find!
Behavior
The Behavior tab is for all the information about how your visitors behave on your web- site. What this means is that it contains all the information of how your website’s visitors interact with your website. What pages do they visit consecutively, have they used your site search, how much time have they spent waiting for your pages to load, etc. You’ll notice a Behavior Flow that’s very similar to the User
Flow we already talked about.
However, the most interesting data will be found under Site Content, Site
Search and In-Page Analytics. The Site Content section will give you a good
idea of which pages attract the most visitors. The pages are ranked by pageviews by default, with the pages with the most pageviews on top. These are usually pretty similar to the Landing Pages you’ll find below it. Below the Landing Pages, you’ll find the Exit Pages. This will give you a list of pages with the most Exits. Knowing these pages makes it easy to learn which pages you should focus on when optimizing your website.
The Site Search section gives you insight in what people search for on your website and where they end up. This can give you a really good idea of what people are actually looking for and if your website is offering those things. If you find things that people are searching for, but you don’t have any real content on yet, be sure to add it!
One of the cooler things, in our opinion, of Google Analytics is the In-Page
Analytics feature. What this does, is render your website inside Google
Analytics, and it will tell you how many people clicked where. This can give you great insight in how people are using your website, and if they’re actually using it the way you thought they were.
Yoast Tip
Google has released a Chrome extension for Page Analytics that allows instant access to the In-Page Analytics for a page by just clicking on a button from that page.
Conversion
The last tab in the list in the Conversion tab. When a visitor purchases a product or subscribes for a newsletter we call these actions conversions (see chapter 15 on making money with your website and chapter 19 on A / B-testing). You can track your conversions by setting up goals. If you have a webshop or any kind of (contact)form and / or email subscription on your website, setting up goals is the way to go when analyzing your
read Thijs’ post on setting up goals in Google Analytics. If you still think setting up goals is a too advanced far for you, we can also do it for you.
Click here for more information.
We won’t go into this section further, because it’s actually for the more advanced Google Analytics users and requires a lot of extra settings before anything will show up. However, if you own a webshop, this is definitely a section you should be filling with data, because that’s invaluable!
Yoast Tip
If you want to know more about the specifics of a certain report in Google Analytics, you can watch the instruction videos Google Analytics offers. We’ve found them to be really helpful.