Interpreting Google Analytics Results

This might sound crazy, since Google Analytics is supposed to have analyzed your traffic already. True. But you would still need some thinking to adequately understand the reports from Analytics.

Let’s start from the Executive overview. This screen shows you four charts. One, your traffic for the past week, in terms of visits and unique pageviews. Remember these definitions:

• Page views are the actual number of pages within your site have been visited.
• Visits means the number of times the same person has read your site.
• Unique visitors means the number of unique readers that have to your site, meaning they won’t be re-counted if they return within a span of a few minutes or hours.

Google Analytics will also give you a breakdown of source referrers to your site, and usually majority of this is dominated by search engines such as Google. Sometimes your site would get direct hits, meaning they typed in the URL directly on their browser.

Google Analytics would also give you a map of the world, where your latest visitors are pinpointed as based from the traffic statistics.

Next: Marketing and Conversion analysis