Introduction to Google Analytics

In this lesson, you'll set up a Google Analytics account and then create and insert the Google Analytics code to begin tracking traffic on your web page.

Did that marketing campaign or email blast cause an uptick in site sessions? If you set date ranges for your Analytics data, you can track traffic within a certain month, week, day, or even hour. You'll also use filters and sorting tools to customize your view of your Google Analytics data, so you can see and understand all the information you need (and ignore the rest).

You can use Google Analytics' reporting tools to create your own versions of existing reports—just the information you want, when you want it. In this lesson, you'll set up report categories and design custom reports from scratch.

Have you ever overhauled your website or your marketing campaign and then wondered if your changes would even make a difference? In this lesson, you'll further customize existing and new reports by adding filters—focusing your report's data on very specific activity by certain visitors to your site. You'll find out how to time your reporting to reflect changes in site traffic attributed to promotional activity, social media, and changes in site content.

This lesson focuses on Google Analytics' Webmaster Tools—from the verification process, through which Google Analytics recognizes your account as belonging to a webmaster, to configuring and viewing webmaster reports. These reports include information on your site's search engine optimization—tracking your efforts to be more friendly to search engines and therefore searchable by more people online.

Now that you've improved your site, why not promote it? It's time to learn how to set up web campaigns through Google AdWords. By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to track the impact of campaigns and AdWords advertising through specially created Google Analytics reports.

You know how important it is to set goals in your career, your education, and even your personal life. In this lesson, you'll find out how to develop Google Analytics Goals for building traffic to your website. What you learn in this lesson will help you increase site traffic and make that traffic more effective by attracting more visitors, keeping them for longer periods, and turning visits into clicks and other actions.

Google Analytics data is immediate, and in this lesson, you'll learn exactly what that means. You'll view data in real time, within seconds of when user activity occurs. You'll also learn about intelligence events and set up custom alerts to find out about special activity on your sites. The goal is to show you how to improve your website traffic and see how users respond to your content and marketing efforts.

It's time to build a dashboard to create a workspace for running reports, accessing Analytics data, and making Google Analytics feel more like "home." You can add metrics to measure your most important statistics; widgets to provide quick views; and pie charts, timelines, and tables to customize your dashboard view.

In this lesson, you'll delve into the Admin interface. You'll learn to view established Google Analytics accounts, properties, and views and find out how to add users and determine their roles within your Google Analytics accounts. You'll also find out more about Webmaster Tools, which help you improve your site's searchability and attract new and returning users.

Now that you're an Analytics expert, it's time to share some of that data you've collected and some of the configurations you've created. In this lesson, you'll learn how to email reports to colleagues and export data for use in other applications. You'll also customize the settings that control the sharing of Analytics reports and data.