Google Analytics

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Mouse
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Google Analytics

Post by Mouse »

I have finally managed to get this up and running on my PMP website.

Having looked at the data I can't really see anything that seems useful. I know I'm wrong and it's down to ignorance. ....so does anyone feel like being my mentor and telling me/pointing out the useful bits and why they're useful?

I can pm unless it would be useful to anyone else (probably not as I'm sure you all know what to look for!)

Ta muchly

Mousie
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greenbarn
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Post by greenbarn »

I'm sure that I and many others would find various tips useful, but here's a start point that I think should work okay:

Along the top tab, click on Reporting
On the resulting side bar, click on Acquisition
Under Acquisition, click on All Traffic, then under that click on Referrals.

You'll get a graphic display showing number of Sessions per day, and a table showing where they arrived from - so you can monitor clickthroughs to your site from say a listing site, facebook, etc etc.
It's a good place to start, and my daily check.
You'll probably find a lot of "referrer spam" which is there in the hope that you'll click on it (don't - although AFAIK it's not risky - just designed to get you boost traffic to the spammer's site). Getting rid of that from your stats is another topic.

There's lots more you can do, including checking how visitors moved through your website, along with their landing and exit pages.

Hours of amusement - see you in a couple of weeks!
AndrewH
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Post by AndrewH »

greenbarn wrote:There's lots more you can do, including checking how visitors moved through your website, along with their landing and exit pages.

To do this, first select "Audience" and from that select "Users Flow".

Another thing, (having first switched to "Reporting"), you can single out what happened "yesterday" or some other particular day, or even what is happening "today", by operating the grey down arrow in the area which is devoted to dates, at the top right of the page.
Last edited by AndrewH on Mon Jul 04, 2016 9:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Mouse
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Post by Mouse »

Thank you!! I will have a play with it this afternoon...I may be back with questions!

Mousie
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farley
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Post by farley »

Hi all
We use google analytics to monitor where people visiting our website 'click through' from.
I've just been comparing this with stats available from HFD and they do not correlate at all!
Can anybody shed any light on why this is happening?
Many thanks in advance.
newtimber
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Post by newtimber »

farley wrote:Hi all
We use google analytics to monitor where people visiting our website 'click through' from.
I've just been comparing this with stats available from HFD and they do not correlate at all!
Can anybody shed any light on why this is happening?
Many thanks in advance.
Google ignores known bots and can be set to only count unique visitors so if someone clicks on your site from HFD twice, Google will count it is one referral.
In addition, people can hide or spoof the referrer if they want to for privacy reasons.
HFD's figures are likely to be more accurate but as they want to boost their figures probably count every single click whether it is from a bot or someone clicking your site more than once.
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Nemo
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Post by Nemo »

greenbarn wrote:There's lots more you can do, including checking how visitors moved through your website, along with their landing and exit pages.
AndrewH wrote:To do this, first select "Audience" and from that select "Users Flow".

Another thing, (having first switched to "Reporting"), you can single out what happened "yesterday" or some other particular day, or even what is happening "today", by operating the grey down arrow in the area which is devoted to dates, at the top right of the page.
Ooh thank you. I'd never bothered drilling down that far and didn't know how. Fascinating! Last month about 20% of my traffic originated from a blog post I wrote regarding a local event. Sadly I was already fully booked during the event, but maybe someone might bookmark me to stay another year. You never know. :)

First question, sorry mousie for hijacking :wink: In the users flow, my starting page figure over a year consists of 77 pages. It just shows a / whereas specific pages like my blog post, or calendar pages start with /and then availability calendar etc or whatever the name of the page is. I don't understand why it's not broken down into the specific pages. For example my welcome page doesn't figure anywhere as an individual stat.
newtimber
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Post by newtimber »

Nemo wrote: First question, sorry mousie for hijacking :wink: In the users flow, my starting page figure over a year consists of 77 pages. It just shows a / whereas specific pages like my blog post, or calendar pages start with /and then availability calendar etc or whatever the name of the page is. I don't understand why it's not broken down into the specific pages. For example my welcome page doesn't figure anywhere as an individual stat.
Go to your website home page (ie just type in the name that people would go to get to your site) and see what the actual page displayed in the status bar is. (Some browsers don't display this expanded detail by default and you have to change the settings).
If it doesn't have a /xxxx after it, then google will just display a / instead for that page in the report.
farley
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Post by farley »

Thanks for the insight New Timber.
I can confirm HFDs figures for click throughs are very much higher than Googles .
Oddly HFDs number of completed enquiry forms dosnt match forms received by us. Just wondering if anyone else has found this?
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Nemo
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Post by Nemo »

newtimber wrote:
Nemo wrote: First question, sorry mousie for hijacking :wink: In the users flow, my starting page figure over a year consists of 77 pages. It just shows a / whereas specific pages like my blog post, or calendar pages start with /and then availability calendar etc or whatever the name of the page is. I don't understand why it's not broken down into the specific pages. For example my welcome page doesn't figure anywhere as an individual stat.
Go to your website home page (ie just type in the name that people would go to get to your site) and see what the actual page displayed in the status bar is. (Some browsers don't display this expanded detail by default and you have to change the settings).
If it doesn't have a /xxxx after it, then google will just display a / instead for that page in the report.
Thanks newtimber, there is no / on my home page so I'll now assume that all those stats are people landing on my home page.
Villarais
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Post by Villarais »

As far as I have worked out, / shows people who have hit your home page from elsewhere, and /welcome (in your case and mine too) shows people who have gone back to your home page from within your site.
There is generally no need to go back to a home page, as the navigation bars are usually the same on all pages, but I must admit that I often do, just in case there are more options, or if I want to re-read somethng.
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