Introduction to Google Analytics Reports - Google AdWords Learning Center

With Google Analytics reports, you can determine which marketing efforts are driving the most valuable traffic to your site and see how visitors navigate through your site. Track the marketing initiative performance for your AdWords campaigns, email campaigns, search engine referrals, and even traditional media advertising.

There are five report categories

Visitors
Traffic Sources
Content
Goals
Ecommerce

Visitors Section

The reports in the Visitors section focus on how many visits your site received from different segments of visitors. For example, you can see how many visits you received from each country (Map Overlay). You can see how many visits you received from people whose previous visit to your site was 3 days ago (Recency, under Visitor Loyalty).

The Visitors section is the only section in Google Analytics where you can find the number of people who came to your site. (See Absolute Unique Visitors in the Overview report or in the Absolute Unique Visitors report, under Visitor Trending.) Visits tells you the total number of visits your site received. So, if four people visited your site 10 times each during the active time period, Google Analytics will show that your site received 40 Visits from four Absolute Unique Visitors.

The Visitors section also contains four Visitor Loyalty reports: Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit, and Depth of Visit. Instead of simply stating averages, these reports show the range of visitor interaction on your site. For example, the Visitor Loyalty report shows how many 1st-time, 2nd-time, 3rd-time, etc. visits your site received .

Many of the reports in the Visitors section allow you to compare the overall quality of traffic from different segments of visitors. For example, you can compare visitors from different geographic areas based on their site usage, conversion behavior, and ecommerce profitability (Map Overlay). The following reports in the Visitors section allow you to make these kinds of comparisons: Map Overlay, New vs. Returning, Languages, the Browser Capabilities reports, the Network Properties reports, and User Defined.

Traffic Sources Section

The reports in the Traffic Sources section focus on comparing the quality of traffic you receive from different referrals, search engines, keywords, ads, and marketing campaigns. Most of the reports in this section have site usage, conversion behavior, and ecommerce profitability metrics to compare traffic from different sources.

Direct Traffic focuses specifically on visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or typed your site URL into their browser. The Referring Sites and Search Engines reports allow you to compare traffic from sites and search engines respectively and drill down on each site and search engine to compare URLs or keywords from that site or search engine.

The All Traffic Sources report allows you to compare all traffic across all the sources that send traffic to your site. For example, you can see how paid traffic compares to unpaid traffic or how traffic from Google compares to traffic from another web site.

The Keywords report allows you to compare the effectiveness of keywords across all search engines either with or without regard to whether they are paid or organic (unpaid) keywords. The AdWords reports focus exclusively on AdWords traffic.

To compare the effectiveness of AdWords campaigns and ads, use the Campaigns and Ad Versions reports. These reports will also include any non-AdWords campaigns and ads that you have tagged with campaign variables.

Content Section

Content reports can help you understand how effectively your site engages visitors. The Top Content, Content by Title, and Content Drilldown reports allow you to see which pages on your site were most popular (and therefore, most important), how much time people spent on each page, how frequently people exited your site from each page, and how valuable each page was to your business.

The Navigation Analysis reports (accessible from the Content Overview report) allow you to see how visitors navigate through your site. You can use this information to determine whether visitors are easily able to find what they are looking for or if they are getting confused and leaving your site. You can also use the Site Overlay to view click, conversion, and ecommerce information overlaid on each link on your site.

The Landing Page Optimization reports (also accessible from the Content Overview report) can help you tailor landing pages for your ads and referrals. If visitors don't see information on landing pages that addresses their reasons for visiting your site, they will simply leave without purchasing anything or converting to your goals. You can also use the Top Landing Pages report to monitor the overall effectiveness of your landing pages, while the Top Exit Pages report displays the pages from which visitors left your site. If there are pages on this report that you don't consider to be logical exit points, you might try to understand why visitors leave from these pages. Consider how you might change the pages or redesign portions of the site so that fewer visitors leave unexpectedly.

Goals Section

The information in the Goals reports can help you understand how visitors arrive, or don't arrive at your goals. For example, the Funnel Visualization report shows you the points at which visitors progress through or abandon the conversion steps (for example, shopping cart checkout process) you have defined.

Tracking these pages reveals how efficiently your site directs visitors to your goal. If any of the funnel pages are overly complicated or hard to navigate, they'll show signs of significant visitor drop-off and lower conversion rates. This information helps you concentrate on improving the pages with the poorest performance for funneling users toward your site goal.

In addition to tracking the funnels you have defined, you can also use the Reverse Goal Path to see if visitors are converting via other click paths.

Ecommerce Section

In addition to the Ecommerce metrics (available wherever you see the Ecommerce tab on reports), there is also an Ecommerce section that focuses exclusively on ecommerce activity. Please note that no data will appear in these reports (or on the Ecommerce tab in the reports in other sections) unless you have enabled ecommerce reporting.

These reports show revenue (the value of purchases), conversion rate (the percentage of visits that resulted in a purchase), transactions (the number of purchase orders) and Average Order Value (the average revenue from each purchase).

The Product Performance reports (Product Overview, Product SKUs, Categories) show you how many different products generate your revenue and you can click on any product name, SKU, or category to view detailed information for that item.

The Transactions report lists of all transactions on your site and is useful for seeing all the ecommerce transactions that are being used to calculate ecommerce metrics.

The Visits to Purchase and Time to Purchase reports help you understand your sales cycle by showing you how long it takes for visitors to purchase.