Your new website is complete, yay! You know that Google Analytics is set up, it’s useful, and you’re pretty sure that someone is tasked with looking at it from time-to-time, but it’s just too overwhelming!

We get it! We hear from many clients about how they generally avoid going through their Google Analytics because it’s too much. So, we’ve put together a basic starter guide for beginners that answers questions about Google Analytics.

In this post you’ll find answers to the following questions:

1) Please explain Account/Property/View.
2) How do I add users to my Analytics account?
3) How do I exclude IP/employees from being tracked in Analytics?
4) How do I see where my website visitors are coming from?
5) Which report shows what pages people are visiting?
6) Can I export reports?

Hope you find this helpful!

 

1) Please explain Account, Property and View.

One of the most common questions we get is about the difference between account/ property/view and what goes where. Here’s a brief overview:

• Account. The all access pass for your company’s Google Analytics. Accounts may contain multiple properties.
• Property. These are sub divisions of your company’s account, such as a website, sub-domain, or mobile application. For example, a company may track their website as one property, their mobile app as a second property, and their blog as a third property.
• View. Collects data from a specific property. Properties can have multiple views. All reports within defined views will only pull data from that segment in the reports. For example, you may decide to segment and create a view to reflect the different geographical markets you target. Or setup a view that segments only traffic that purchased from their site.

Keep in mind that best practice is to always create a master view for each property. A master view should have no filters, or exclusions and will contain all historical data from when the site was set up.`

For more details on this, please click here.

2) How do I add a user to my Analytics account? Is there a limit?

You can add as many users as you need to your Google Analytics account. There are three levels of access you can grant to a user: Account, Property and View (see question number one for details).

1. Open Google Analytics: https://analytics.google.com/ and login with the google account associated to your Analytics. Once you are in go to the view set up for your account.
2. Click Admin, to see the Account/Property/View options.
3. In the Account, Property, or View column (depending upon whether you want to add users at the account, property, or view level), click User Management.
4. In the Account users list, click +, then click Add new users.
5. Enter the email address for the user’s Google Account.
6. Select Notify new users by email to send a message to the user.
7. Select the permissions you want (Manage, Edit only, Collaborative, Read only).
8. Click Add.

One thing to note. When you give users access on a view level, they will only see the see the reports based on that view’s data. To learn more about the different types of permission levels, click here.

3) How do I exclude my IP from Google Analytics?

When you start collecting data in Analytics, you want to avoid having your internal site testing and employee interactions included in your data. Excluding internal activities will ensure that the data collected reflects how your customers are interacting with your site, and prevent inaccuracies in your reporting. To do that, you will need to exclude your IP from the data. Here’s how.

1. Identify your IP address by searching “what is my IP address” on google.com.
   (You can also ask your company’s network administrator what the IP addresses are)
2. Go to Admin > View
3. Under view, select Filters
4. Click on Add Filter
5. Name your filter
6. To add a single IP address: Filter Type = Predefined > Exclude > traffic from the IP > that are equal to 
   Or, you can also add a Subnet of IP addresses by going to: Filter Type = Predefined > Exclude > traffic from the IP > that begin with
   

Learn more about creating filters in Google Analytics.

4) Where is my website traffic coming from?

On the side menu go to: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels report. Set the date range to match the time frame you are looking for in the top right corner.

The report shows results for pre-set channel groupings, they are:

• • Organic search. Visitors came via unpaid search results (such as Google or Yahoo)
  • Referral. Visitors clicked through to your site, from a link on a different website (such as a partner site)
  • Direct. Visitors came directly to the website or the source is unknown (for example, if someone typed the URL directly in the address bar)
  • Social. Visitors who came through social channels (such as Facebook, Twitter)
  • Paid. Visitors came via paid ad campaigns (Google Ads, Facebook ads, etc)
  • (Other). Indicates visitors who arrived via other paid advertising other than search or display (such as video ads, UTM links)

You can also create custom channel groupings as well, click here for more information.

This quick video offers tips for understanding how to analyze data with this report.

5) Where can I see what pages were visited?

To drill down deeper on your site content, to see how visitors engage with each page. You can do that by going to: Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.

 

Knowing what your top pages are provides insights on how people are interacting with your site.

You can see:

• Pageviews & Unique Pageviews. Shows you which pages get the most visits. Indicating what content is working well, and what isn’t.
• Average Time on Site & Bounce Rate. Shows how long people, on average, are staying on a page. So if the average is high and bounce rate is low, that’s a good indicator that visitors are engaging with your content. If the average is low and bounce rate is high, that indicates people are not very engaged and leaving quickly.

6) Can I Export Reports?

Yes. You absolutely can! At the top of any report you will see an export function that allows you to download specific data as a report.

• The PDF format is useful if you want to present as-is.
• Exporting as a CSV or XLSX is most useful when working through the numbers.

 

I hope that you find this post useful and that it helps you tap into all the interesting findings Google Analytics is collecting for you. To learn more about the tools available on Google Analytics , take a look at this interface map. It offers a number/legend system to take you through it.

 

Please feel free to share your thoughts and any other questions you’d like to see on the blog by leaving a comment below.