The Hostname report under the Network Properties section of reports can offer you several insights. In Google Analytics, the Hostnames report lists the traffic to the different domains and subdomains on which you have installed the tracking code for your account.

Use this report to see traffic to subdomains such as blog.mysite.com, vanity URLs, and if someone else has your code installed on their site.

In the above example visits came from 7 different hostnames.

• Notice the main domain is listed twice both with and without the www, www.mysite.com and mysite.com.  It is an SEO best practice to always redirect non-www to www.  This also has the side benefit of cleaning up your reports.
• We can also see the traffic from different subdomains such the blog and store in this site’s case.
• Although not evident in this report, should you be tracking multiple top level domains with the same GA code they would show up here as well.
• Vanity URLs are an important marketing tool allowing you to attach a unique URL to offline ad campaigns and track their results through Analytics.  This report will show those hostnames as well.
• Also useful in this report is tracking hostnames that are not one of your own. Although in this example it is just one visit for this time period, a high traffic domain with your code installed could skew results quite a bit and point to someone scraping your site for content by reading the source code (a practice that could hurt your ranking in the search engines).  If they grab the GA tracking code as well their hostname could show up in this report.  So be on the look out for these.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Network Properties – Connection Speeds

After the Browser Capabilities reports are the Network Properties reports. These reports include Network Locations, Hostnames, and Connection Speeds. At first glance you may be wondering what value knowing something like your visitor’s network location would be to you. Although it may not be something you use regularly, reading between the lines of these reports can reveal some useful information depending on the nature of your site and your business.

Let’s start with the Network Location report. The network location is defined by the registrant information for an IP address. Since many IP addresses are registered through ISPs you are generally going to see a list of ISPs in this report. But some IP addresses are registered to corporations. This is where some useful nuggets of information can be found. You can see if competitors or potential customers are viewing your site. If a customer is coming to your site and not contacting you maybe it is an opportunity to reach out to them. This is especially useful for B2B sites. Of course if one of your potential customers or competitors is an ISP, this may not be of much use to you.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Network Properties – Hostnames