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16
Jul
2010

How to Use Google Analytics to Build Businesses (Part 1 – Google Analytics Dashboard)

Google Analytics (GA) is by far the most popular web analytics program on the web. Currently 57% of the top 10,000 websites use Google Analytics as the de facto web analytics program due to its ease of use, zero payment obligation and advanced functionality.

However, it appears that most people who use Google Analytics have little idea how to segment, data mine and use Google Analytics data to improve their online businesses. Given the rich features and massive number of options, most webmasters fail to grasp the full potential of Google Analytics unless they are ready to dig deeper. What we at Cenango are going to do is carry out a blog post rally encouraging webmasters to explore more on Google Analytics and encourage them to go beyond the nice dashboard.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics is truly a great program that can help a business improve their marketing efforts. With advanced segmentation and vital information arranged in such a way for easy data mining, Google Analytics lead the way for today’s web analytics.

Most of the features in Google Analytics need to be explored in detail to yield the best utility. But at the same time, GA has put the most important data on the default dashboard and the user can customize their dashboard according to their preference.

Let’s take a walk around the Google Analytic Dashboard.

Google Analytics on Cenango

This is the typical view of the Google Analytics dashboard. Each visual element can be dragged around according to your preference.

The biggest visual element in GA is the traffic graph and the site usage elements. By default you are shown site traffic for the past month.  The importance of these features is understandable. This report can be easily exported as a PDF or an XML file or it can be e-mailed to a preferred email address as well. You can send the report to yourself or you can add more people to the thread.

There are several advanced segments that you can add to the traffic view. You can add up to 4 advanced segments from the drop down list.  These are the options. (All visits are shown by default.)

  • New Visitors
  • Returning Visitors
  • Paid Search Traffic
  • Non-paid Search Traffic
  • Search Traffic
  • Direct Traffic
  • Referral Traffic
  • Visits with Conversions
  • Mobile Traffic
  • Non-bounce Visits

You can also create a new advanced segment or manage your advanced segments without much fuss. It’s pretty straight forward. Once created, you can test your advanced segment before you go ahead with it. So no worries about messing things up.

There are four independent elements that you can drag around and reposition. This helps you to determine and select the most important elements that you want to grab your attention first.

Have a closer look at Google Analytics elements when you visit the site again. You will notice that there are many things that you can do with Google Analytics. We’ll cover specific options in our forthcoming blog posts. Do keep in touch. This is going to be very interesting.

Category: Web Design

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