How to Streamline Your Google Analytics Experience

Simplifying and Customizing the Complexity of Google Analytics to Realize its True Power.

Google Analytics can be overwhelming. The best way to understand it fully is to organize the data in a meaningful manner. Luckily, the program has a number of built-in ways to easily achieve that. These features are designed to provide clarity to your metrics so you can ultimately make data driven decisions.

Setting up a Dashboard
A dashboard is a single page view where you can display information about your website. Widgets placed in your dashboard view display predetermined data. You can have up to 12 widgets in a dashboard, each one pulling in its own segment of information of your choice. A widget might provide an overview of your audience, your active visitors, their locations, the ratio between new and returning visitors, their traffic sources, and much more.

The Dashboards link in the menu on the left side of your Google Analytics offers two options: the Private link is a dropdown that gives you My Dashboard, your default dashboard. The +New Dashboard link lets you create one from scratch, and choosing the Starter Dashboard from the popup box, gives you something tangible to work with and refine.

Setting up Goals
Goals are things you can set up to track certain visitor behavior patterns. Suppose you have a new page set up with a special promotion, which you heavily promote from your home page. Your Goal could be to track which visitors successfully land on that page. For example, the Goal you set up might tell you that you've managed to convince 85% of your home page visitors, on average, to click over to the desired page.

Older versions of Google Analytics require you to click Actions on the top menu, then choose Edit, and in your profile settings you'll see a column marked Goals. There are four possible sets, and each can hold five goals. Select the set most applicable to you and edit accordingly. New versions of Google Analytics require you to select the "gear" button, top right of the page, then choose your account and website. This will take you to the correct section containing Goals.

Using Shortcuts
Shortcuts allow you to save your customized settings to a report so that the data is always viewed exactly as you wish. Shortcuts are easy to set up. Choose a regularly used Custom Report or Standard Report. Segment the report, filtering the data to appear as you wish, then simply click the Shortcut link above the report. Give your Shortcut a meaningful name and click OK to save it within the Home tab where you can access it later.

Need assistance? Contact CC Communications online or call 1-704-761-4676 to learn how we can help organize your analytics account to provide actionable insights for your businesses.