If you have the Google Analytics plugin activated and correctly configured, you will see a snapshot of your Google Analytics data on your dashboard when you log in to WordPress. This provides an excellent glance at your website analytics over the previous 30 days. If you want to see more detailed statistics, hover your mouse cursor over the “Google Analytics Summary” heading in your dashboard. You will see a link called “View Full Stat Report,” and clicking it will take you to your Google Analytics account. Alternatively, you can log in through the Google Analytics login page: https://www.google.com/analytics/settings. Within your Google Analytics account, you will find detailed statistics about your website traffic and visitors.
Important Considerations:
- The data from Google Analytics, like any other web tracking software, is not perfect. There are nuances in interpretation as well as technical variables that can skew the data. When dealing with small sample sizes, you will often see wild fluctuations in the data.
- All visits to your website, including your own, are tracked in Google Analytics. This means that the numbers are somewhat skewed by your own visits. You can exclude your own visits when you are logged in to your WordPress dashboard (we enable this feature by default). The only way to exclude your own visits, regardless of whether or not you are logged in, is if you have a static IP address and set up Google Analytics to filter out all visits from that IP address.
- Time on Site is more accurately defined as “time on site minus the time spent on the last page visited.” So it is not exact, but it is useful for relative comparisons (i.e. if your average time on site goes up or down from one month to the next).
The first screen you get to should be the Dashboard. Here you can see a snapshot of the past 30 days’ activity on your website. You can also access the data through the navigation on the left-hand side. If you want to change the date range, you can find a drop-down menu in the upper right. When you click it, you can change the date range by clicking dates in the calendar or typing them in manually. You can also compare two date ranges by checking the “Compare to Past” box and adjusting the date ranges if necessary. When you change the date range, the new date range will be in effect for all pages/reports you go to within Google Analytics. When you sign out of Google Analytics, the date range is reset to the default of the past 30 days.
The graph at the top of the dashboard can be customized. There is a drop-down menu at the upper left of the graph. “Visits” is selected by default. Below, there are several modules on the dashboard that provide overviews of common statistics. At the bottom of each module there is a link labeled “view report”. You can click those links to get to more detailed information.
Visitors
New visitors are not always accurately tracked. If a visitor to your site clears his or her browser before visiting again, or a lot of time passes between his or her visits to your site, Google Analytics could count those visits as coming from separate visitors.
Traffic Sources
This is broken down into Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, and Search Engines. If you click “view report” and go to the bottom of the page you will see your top sources and keywords. A Referring Site visit occurs when someone clicks a link from another website that takes them to your site. This data lets you know which of your profiles, or sites you are affiliated with, are bringing you the most traffic. You may also find websites that you never knew linked to yours. Keyword data is also very useful. It tells you what search terms people have successfully used to find your website.
Content
This breaks down the data by page. Here you can find which pages people go to the most. You can see how long they spend on those pages relative to the others. To see the detailed data, you will need to go to the page Content > Top Content.
Map Overlay
This shows you where your visitors are coming from. Once you get to the city level, the data is not always exact, but it should be geographically close. Sometimes, your visitors’ Internet connections are routed through neighboring cities. In such cases, the visitor location will be logged as coming from that neighboring city.
