Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool for your website and perhaps comes off as a bit intimidating in the beginning.

Following up the Sept. 13 Communicators Forum, here are the questions and answers from our Google Analytics presentation. Also, towards the bottom is a list of Google Analytics resources. These questions and answers only scratch the surface, so don’t be afraid to dig deeper on your own. You’ll learn the most by exploring, and don’t worry — you can’t break it!

Q&A:

Q: We would like to know if it is possible to find out the age or other demographic information about visitors to our sites. My sense now is that, beyond geographic location, Google does not provide demographic information.

A: Google Analytics doesn’t display age or other personal information about users.

Q: How do I set a date range that is always “prior month” or prior year?

A: Upper right-hand corner, click the drop-down arrow next to the date. You select any date range.

Q: How do I interpret visits vs unique visitors?

A: Visits: the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site

Unique visitors: total number of people visiting your site (but not accurate because of visitors using multiple devices and cache/cookies being cleared)

Q: What is a bounce? (bounce rate?)

A: The percentage of visits that go to only one page before exiting the site.

Q: How do I separate traffic into what people at Rice are looking at and what people outside of Rice are looking at?

A: Go to Content, Content drilldown, add a secondary dimension: Network Domain. You can filter out all of the people visiting from a Rice network and see what content the external audience is most interested in.

Q: How do I know how much of my traffic is from a mobile device?

A: Go to Audience, Mobile, Overview/Devices. Or you can create a custom report to look at mobile traffic to a specific page. Build filters to include Page (exact page path) and include mobile (reglex Yes).

Q: What part of my home page are people looking at?

A: You can determine which content is clicked on, but Google doesn’t track what people are looking at yet. (That’ll change when Google Glass comes out.)

Q: Where do they go from my home page?

A: Go to Audience then Visitors Flow. You can get an idea of people’s click-through paths. Also, through the Navigation Summary tab under content.

Q: What web pages can I eliminate because no one is going there?

A: Hard to tell. People may not be visiting a site because it’s hard to get there. It’s up to you to determine what content you want people to look at.

Q: If someone finds me from a search engine, what words did they use for their search?

A: Go to Traffic Sources, Overview, Keywords. OR Audience, Search, and then add a secondary dimension: Keyword.

Q: Can I tell how many visitors are repeat customers vs. unique customers?

A: Go to Audience then New vs Returning.

Q: Can I tell if visitors are part of the Rice community vs. rest of world?

A: Go to Audience, Network, and then filter out all the people visiting from a Rice network.

Q: Can you tell if they visit items on a page such as blogs, twitter feeds, etc… or does it only look at page hits?

A:  Go to Traffic Sources, Social, Plugins (social source and action is interesting). You can even click on the social site and see what content people are looking.

Q: Do you have any tips on how to interpret Google Analytics in regards to guiding a site redesign?  

A: Absolutely.

Start with a report of your traffic for the last year on the current site.  Get a good understanding of what people are looking at, and how they get there. If you see something that is doing a lot of traffic but isn’t on the homepage, you probably need to bubble it up.  If you have a significant drop off on your homepage, you may need to simplify it.  

We see many sites that are structured around people’s gut instincts and hunches as to what users will want to view. Look at the data and see if those instincts are correct or not.

Look at the technology that people are using to view your site with. Web designers tend to snub their noses to designing for Internet Explorer, which is fine unless 15 percent or your customers are using Internet Explorer.  

Look at the percentage of mobile users. Are there enough people using mobile devices to access your site? If so, you probably want to build the site in a responsive fashion. Seriously, how many people would you be comfortable telling to go away? The analytics will tell you just how many you risk by not being responsive. 

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