Google Analytics Dashboard Basics

The Google Analytics Account determines how data is collected from your websites and manages who can access that data.

Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium to small-sized businesses generally (only) use one account. When you create an account, you also automatically create a property and, within that property, a view for that account. But each Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple views.

Each Google Analytics account has at least one “property.” Each property can collect data independently of each other using a unique tracking ID that appears in your tracking code.

View Settings

Just as each account can have multiple “properties,” each property can have multiple “views.” You can use a feature called Filters in your configuration settings to determine what data you want to include in the reports for each view.

Couple important things to note about views:

1. New views only include data from the date the view was created and onwards. When you create a new view, it will not include past data.
2. If you delete a view, only administrators can recover that view within a limited amount of time. Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted.

User Permissions

You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level inherits permissions from the level above it.

• “Admin”, Google Analytics lets you set user permissions for: “managing users,” “edit,” “collaborate,” or “read and analyze.”
• “Managing users” lets users add or remove user access to the account, property, or view.
• “Edit” lets users make changes to the configuration settings.
• “Collaborate” allows users to share things like dashboards or certain measurement settings.
• And finally, “Read and Analyze” lets users view data, analyze reports, and create dashboards, but restricts them from making changes to the settings or adding new users.

Analytics Navigation and Interface description

Account/Property/View switcher

If you have multiple accounts, properties, or views set up, you can easily switch between them by clicking on the pulldown menu with the title of your View in the upper-left corner.

Alert icon

Clicking the bell icon in the upper right shows you alerts about your Google Analytics properties and views.

Feedback, Help, and Settings

At the top right of your Analytics view are two more icons:

• The "question mark" icon lets you send feedback to Google Analytics or search Help articles

• The user icon lets you switch between different Google accounts, manage your current Google account, or sign out

  

Customization

The Customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business. We'll cover customization in an advanced course.

Real-Time Reports

Real-Time reports let you look at live user behavior on your website including information like where your users are coming from and if they’re converting.

Audience Reports

Audience reports show you characteristics about your users like age and gender, where they’re from, their interests, how engaged they were, whether they’re new or returning users, and what technology they’re using.

Acquisition Reports

Acquisition reports show you which channels (such as advertising or marketing campaigns) brought users to your site. This could include different marketing channels such as:

• "Organic” (or unpaid search)
• “CPC” (“cost per click” or paid search)
• “Referral” (traffic that comes from another website)
• “Social” (from a social network)
• or “Other,” (a group of low volume traffic sources)

Behaviour Reports

Behavior reports show how people engaged on your site including which pages they viewed, and their landing and exit pages. With additional implementation, you can even track what your users searched for on your site and whether they interacted with specific elements.

Conversion Reports

Conversion reports allow you to track website goals based on your business objectives.

Admin

The Admin section contains all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions, tracking code, view settings, and filters.