How to uncover insights

Course content (12 lessons)

Now that we have a pretty good understanding of where everything is, we can take a deeper dive into the different reporting features. Key highlights: * Learn the difference between metrics and dimensions * How to use the date picker, comparisons * Segmenting users and behaviors

[MUSIC PLAYING] Now, that we have a better understanding of what reports are available to us, it's time to take a deeper dive into these reports and get a handle on the different metrics and dimensions that can help us understand our users better. Here, I'm going to show you how to use the date picker to compare previous periods to our current situation, as well as how to segment users and behaviors to uncover true insights that we can leverage on our websites.
Now, that we know all the different reports available in Google Analytics, it's time to start putting them to work for us. First thing, we should always do is check the dates of our reports. Here we can customize how long of a view we want to have, as well as compare it to previous periods or years or even to have the customer dimension. This will give us added insight into understanding our progress compared to previous periods.
Armed with this comparison, we can then see how well we're doing in comparison to that previous time. Are we making further progress? Are we losing traction? All of these questions can be answered with the date picker. There are a number of ways that we can slice and dice this data to make it more meaningful for us in our home business goals.
I'm going to show you a few of the quick and easy ways to iterate our data so that we can find more meaningful insights in our reports. First area where you can go to is adding a secondary metric. If we're comparing page views, we might also want to add how that correlates to our entrances. And also, mix and match any of these reports and metrics to get a better sense of our performance.
Another great feature that we can leverage to our own advantage is the secondary dimension feature. This one is largely based on the primary dimension that you have in there, but still gives us extra insight into our report. Let's say we want to clean up our data and exclude some parts of our reporting that aren't necessarily relevant to us in this moment.
We can go into this advanced segment area and exclude certain criteria from our reports. In this example, I want to see what pages are performing really well that are not collections pages. So here we're going to type in collections, and based on my rules here, we should now see a report that doesn't include any of the collections pages.
So now, we have a clearer sense of the top Viewed pages that are not collections. If you're more of a visual learner, you can also change up your tables and charts to provide a more graphical representation of the data. Here we can see the different pie charts and color-coded systems, as well as using bar graphs based on page views and information there.
The last one giving us some more colorful, insightful representation if you require something more visual. Another quick report that you might find useful is in the channels section. Here we can see all the different marketing channels that are bringing traffic to our website. But if we include the secondary dimension of device category, we can then see what devices people are on and which channels they're coming to our website.
This can give us a great insight into whether we should be optimizing our social for mobile experiences or focusing more on our paid advertising on desktops. Either way you look at it, this stuff can be really helpful in figuring out your messaging and how you want to really engage with your audience.
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Using the date picker makes it easy to compare different time frames to measure your progress. Although helpful, not all metrics are created equal. Here’s why bounce rate and time on page can be a little misleading.

How to uncover insights

Course content (12 lessons)

Module 1: Google Analytics: What is it and how do I set it up?

01 |Module 2: Exploring the data and finding insights

02 |Module 3: Advanced techniques and customizations