In this beginner guide, Josh Hall gives you a quick overview and beginners guide of Google Analytics!

But over the years, I’ve discovered that, as complex as Google Analytics can be, the basics are very simple to view and understand.

I’ve also discovered that you’ll typically only look at 3 main areas in order to view and understand your site traffic.

I like to dub these 3 areas:

1. WHO is looking at your website
2. HOW they got to your website
3. WHAT they are doing when they’re on your website

While Google Analytics doesn’t have these areas described as those terms, you’ll find them on the left side of your dashboard labeled as:

• Audience (who)
• Acquisition (how)
• Behavior (what)

Let’s take a look at these and how to understand them inside Google Analytics!

1) Audience (who is looking at your site)

This tab shows you the ins and outs of who is looking at your website.

It gives you detailed data on the demographics of your website users such as age, gender, location, devices, browsers and more! It’s awesome to know as little or as much as you’d like to know about WHO is looking at your site.

2) Acquisition (how they got to your website)

Acquisition (HOW users are getting to your website)

The Acquisitions tab in Google Analytics shows you the ins and outs of HOW users got to your website. You can track organic vs direct, social or referral traffic and even drill down further to see what sites you’re getting most of your traffic from.

Additionally, if your website is also set up with Google Search Console, you can track the top keywords that people are searching to find your site.

3) Behavior (what they’re doing on your site)

Google Analytics Behavior (WHAT people are doing on your site)

Finally, the Behavior tab shows you in depth, what users are actually doing on your site.

From page views, bounce rate, average time on page, to common behavior flows and even site insights like page speed data, the options under this tab show you the details of what’s going on via your site and what your users are doing.

*** Bonus – how to add users to Google Analytics ***

Add users to Google Analytics under Admin settings

Additionally, I want to make sure you know how to add different users (i.e. team members, ad partners, etc) to your Google Analytics which is luckily very easy to do!

To add users to your Google Analytics:

1. Go to Admin and under the
2. Property information section, you can go into
3. Property Access Management to add users to that website

You can also add users to the full account or create separate views via the access manager, but more often than not, I use the property access management tab and assign permissions for each user from there.

I hope this beginners look at Google Analytics helps give you some confidence with viewing and understanding your website traffic!

Courtesy of: Josh Hall