Important parameters and sections of Google Analytics explained

In our previous posts, we talked about the best position to manually fix in your Google Analytics tracking codes on Blogger template and we also went further to describe how you can easily get the Analytics tracking code.

Today, we are assuming that that aspect has been settled and we are moving on to mention the important parameters and sections of Google Analytics that might still be confusing you as a new user.

For instance, someone told me recently that he does not understand the terms in that Analytic dashboard and was asking me what they mean my session and that he sees that a lot whenever he logs into his Analytics dashboard. So we are here to unravel those confusing aspects of Google Analytics.

Let’s kick-start immediately without wasting any time.

When you log into your Google Analytics dashboard, you will see the 4 menus options at the top, with our interest for this topic being the Reporting option, then you will also see 8 different available options at the left hand pane of your screen and each of the options containing sub-options that can be seen on the options drop down menu when clicked, then coming to the right hand side of the screen is the largest area that displays the reporting options either in charts, graphs, table or just pictorially.

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The two major area of concentration will be the left hand pane with those options and the large right hand area which gives you mostly the pictorial representations of the activities taking place on your blog.

Coming to the left hand pane with the different options, the two most common options that you need to take note of are the Real Time option and the Audience option. Now we are going to explain them in details.

Starting with the Real Time option, the Real Time option on your Google Analytics page is that which is used to monitor the activities on your blog as they happen instantaneously. Now the overview sub-option in the Real Time main option displays these real time activities on the right large area of your Analytics page. It shows;

= => The number of people on your site right now with their geographical locations

= => It also shows you the keywords, site that referred them, pages they are viewing and also conversations as they happen

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Secondly, the Audience option – on the overview sub-option in the Audience option, you get to see the display on the right hand area the session counts, users counts, pageveiws counts, pages/session, average session duration, bounce rate and you also get to see your audience demography. In other sub-options there, you can check out the Browsers, platform, Operating Systems of the devices with which your visitors are using to visit.

We believe here that you are quite familiar with those words like users, pageviews counts, users count, bounce rate etc. then for session, if you don’t really understand what is meant by session, it is simply the period of time that your blog visitors are actively engaged on your blog. In other words it also means the quality time that those visitors spend on your blog.

Then we also want to draw your attention on the reporting periods of time on your Analytics pages. Apart from the Real Time monitoring which we say happens instantaneously other reporting parameters are set by default to a period of last one month prior to your current date.

But you can however manually change or choose any particular date or period in which you want to the reporting to display. The date feature is found close the right hand top of the large reporting area of your Analytics page, so you can change the date over there.

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Finally, there are lots of other reporting options on your Google Analytics page that you can always play around with and figure out things for yourself to know how they work. For instance you can decide to incorporate your Adsense to your Analytics to track how well your ads perform. You will even get to appreciate Analytics more the moment you start using it yourself to monitor the activities on your pages and you will also get to understand why we say that it is the best blog monitoring tool out there.

If you are happy with this piece, kindly use the comment box to express yourself or if you have question that you need clarification on, you can equally do that down the comment section.