The Visitor Map Overlay report shows you where your visitors are coming from, allowing you to analyze metrics by geography. This report uses the visitor’s IP address to pin-point their location. The data is typically quite accurate, but keep in mind that is may not always be available and a certain number of visitor locations will show as “not set,” meaning GA was not able to determine where they were coming from.

Navigate to this report from the menu on the left. The default view will be visits by country. Each country is color coded by density with the darker the color the higher the reported metric from that location. A density key is in the lower left corner of the map.

Roll your mouse over each country to view the exact metric for that location.

Change the metric displayed on the map by opening the menu in the upper left corner of the map and selecting a new metric.

In this example I selected the new metric of bounce rate and the map below reflects these rates.

To drill down into more detail for a specific country click on it and your map will change to that country by itself. Keep drilling down to a smaller region (such as a state) and finally down to city by clicking on the territory or region.

Keep in mind when viewing the Map Overlay reports that aggregate metrics can be a bit misleading. Notice how closely this visits map matches a basic population distribution map of the United States. It stands to reason that you will get more visits from highly populated states such as California and while North Dakota, with its smaller population, results in fewer visits.

Percentage or per-visit metrics can be much more useful. When looking at the Percent of New Visits on the map below, North Dakota has a very different story than on the map above.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – New vs. Returning

The Visitor Benchmark report allows you to see how your site is doing compared to other sites in the same category as you. In order for this feature of Google Analytics to work at its best site owners need to opt in to share their data. But don’t worry; the data is a collective of all sites that opt in. Your personal site data will not be viewable by anyone else.

Navigate to this report from the menu on the left.

The default view shows you several metrics compared to all sites of a similar size.

To make more specific comparisons open the category list and compare your metrics against sites in your same category by selecting the category that matches your business and clicking the “select category” button.

Comparing your data against others in your category and similar sites can help you understand it better and even gain some insights. But remember the benchmarking data is only as good as the number of people sharing their data. The more that share the better the data becomes.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Map Overlay

The Visitor Overview Report presents a snapshot of who is visiting you site and how long they are staying. It is essentially a beefed up hit counter that gives you a high level view of your site stats. But remember to drill down and compare date ranges to search out those useful insights.

Navigate to this report from the menu on the left.

From the visitor overview screen select the date range you want to view. The data displayed includes such things as visits, pageviews, time on site, and bounce rate.

For better insight use the date comparison feature and see how one time period is performing compared to a previous period.

Be sure to note that there is a difference between visit and visitor. Google Analytics measures both.  A visit is the individual session initiated by the visitor, or person.  If that visitor is inactive for 30 minutes or more or if they leave your site and return after 30 minutes their next session will be counted as a new visit but the same visitor.  In the examples above 251,213 visitors made 327,057 visits to this site.  Meaning some people came more than once.

Here are a few more definitions that will be helpful when viewing your reports:

Unique Visitors - Determined by cookies, this is the number of visitors that have not been to your site before.  Keep in mind that things such as deleting cookies, using different computers or browsers and multiple people using the same computers can skew these numbers somewhat.

Pageviews - Each instance of the browser loading a page.  For Google Analytics this is each time the tracking code is loaded by your browser.

Bounce Rate - A one-page visit.  In other words, a visitor comes to your site, views one page, then leaves from the same page they landed on without going to any others.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Benchmarking

The final option available for sharing reports through Google Analytics is to email them. This can be done from within any of the reports with a simple click of a button and a few steps to set things up. As with most everything in GA, you have several options for emailing your reports; send it now, schedule it for future or repeated emailing or add it to an email you already have set up.

To access any of these options start by clicking the email button at the top of the report you wish to send.

Send Now:

Click the Email button then complete the information on the “Send Now” tab.
Send to others: Who do you want this report to go to? Fill in the recipients separated by commas. If you want to receive a copy be sure to select the “send to me” box.
Subject: Give the email a name so people are sure to open it and read the reports.
Description: Not required, but it gives your recipients an idea of what they are getting.
Format: Select from PDF, XML, CSV or TSV. The report will be in an attachment in the format you select.
Word verification: Need to make sure you are human.
Send: Click on the send button and you are done.

Schedule:

Click the Email button then complete the information on the “Schedule” tab.
The steps are the same as the Send Now option above up through the format step.
After that you have the option to select your date range and emailing schedule. If you want to include a date comparison check the box. Then click the schedule button.

Add to Existing:

Once you have set up one or more scheduled reports you can then add more reports through the Add to Existing tab. Check the email you would like to add the new report to and click the Add Report button.

Deleting or Changing Scheduled Reports:

If you no longer need a scheduled report to be sent out or need to change a report removing or changing it is simple. From the Settings menu on the left select the email option.

From this screen you can manage scheduled emails. Click on the email name to change it or on the trash can icon to the right to delete it.

Up Next: Visitor Reports - Overview

If you do not want to grant access to your Google Analytics account to everyone but still have a need to distribute reports among various people or departments you have the option of exporting data. You can select which reports are needed and make them available in several formats as necessary.  Rather than being done on a user basis like granting direct access, you can export at the report level with a few easy steps.

Step 1:
Log into Google Analytics.

Step 2:
Navigate to the report you wish to share.

Step 3:
Configure the report as you want it to be exported. Be sure to select your date ranges, dimensions, number of rows, etc.

Step 4:
Click on the export button and select the format you would like. Choose from PDF, XML, CSV or TSV.

Up Next: Sharing – Emailing Reports

You can gather endless amounts of data from Google Analytics.  But if it never gets into the hands of the people who can analyze it and take action, it is essentially useless.  The value of that data increases once it is shared with your organization.  Google Analytics gives you three ways to share reports; direct access to GA, exporting reports and emailing reports.

Today we will touch on direct access.

Different people in your organization will need different information depending on their role.  Marketing, finance, sales, executives, and IT are all likely to want to see different data.  If you want everyone to navigate GA on their own and review the data as needed use the User Manger to set them each up with direct access.  It can be accessed from the setting screen of your account.

There are two access levels; account administrator and view reports only (user) and they only require a few clicks to set up.  Administrator accounts have access to all configurations and profiles.  Use this one sparingly.  Give someone view reports only access to control which profiles they have access to and limit their ability to make changes.

Up Next: Sharing – Exporting Reports

What is “segmentation?”  Essentially, it is the process of dividing something up into smaller pieces or groups based on like characteristics.  In Google Analytics it is the key to analyzing data.  We are segmenting by dividing our visitors up into groups to analyze their behavior on our sites and find insights.  There are many segmentation options available in GA.  Expand them further by segmenting the segments and analyzing combinations of segments.

In this traffic by search engine report you can click on any of the search engines listed to drill down on the data.

Now you can segment further by selecting any of the dimensions from the drop down box.  Here we are only viewing traffic from Google and have narrowed it down to the Country/territory dimension.  In this case, 79.36% of our total traffic comes from Google and 47.45% of that comes from the United States.  US Google users are a big source of this site’s traffic.  What does that say about who advertising might be best targeted to?  Always be on the lookout for the insights.

Remember from our earlier post that Google has recently changed the “Segment” option to “Dimension.”  This was a change in name only; all the segments remain the same.  We can segment by a multitude of metrics including traffic source, visitor location, user experience and even custom ones.

Up Next: Sharing Google Analytics - Direct Access

Analytics is all about insights, and the insights Google Analytics provides about your site just got a lot better and easier to find.  Google announced the release of several new functions to GA today.

The following features will be available on all accounts in the coming weeks:

1) Advanced Segmentation: You will definitely want to check this one out as soon as it is available in your account.  New predefined segments are easy to apply to both current and historical data.  And even better, the new segment builder tool lets you create, save and apply your own custom segments with incredible ease.

2) Custom Reports: Now you can have your GA reports your way.  This new feature allows you to create, save and edit reports that are completely customized to your needs.  With the new report creation interface being so simple to use you might not want to stop creating new ways to analyze the interactions your visitors have with your site.

3) Motion Charts: Put your reports into motion and sit back and watch your data change over time.  The new visualize button at the top of the reports allows you to analyze data over 5 dimensions (x-axis, y-axis, bubble size and color and over time) and pick up on relationships that may not be easily seen in traditional reports.

4) New Account Management Dashboard: Managing and monitoring your accounts just got easier with this new dashboard.  You will also get key performance metrics in green (for good) and red (for bad) upon logging in so you can see what areas might require a little extra attention right away.

These functions will require a little longer wait as they are in beta testing and will be released to all accounts more gradually. But if you are working with a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant ask them to set you up with early access.

1) Data Export API: This will allow developers to take Google Analytics to whole new levels.  Custom dashboards, offline analysis; the only limitation could be your imagination.

2) Integrated Reporting with AdSense:  If you are an AdSense publisher you will soon be able to track your revenue and impression data right along with your site data.

These are some great new functionalities that you will definately want to spend some time becoming acquainted with once they are available in your account.

Your reports will default to showing the first 10 rows of data.  At the bottom right of the report you have several options for manipulating how much data is displayed and for navigating through the data.

1)    If you know the specific row number you want to view enter it here and that row will be brought to the first position on the page.
2)    Use this drop down box to select the number of rows to display at a time; up to 500.  Keep in mind that the more you show at once the longer the report may take to load.
3)    This area shows you the total number of rows the report contains.
4)    Finally, use the left and right arrows to advance or go back by the number of rows set in the drop down box (#2).

Up Next: Segmentation

Before we start in on filters we need to clarify that there are two kinds of “filters” used in Google Analytics; profile filters and inline report filters.  The filters we will discuss here are inline report filters.  When viewing a report you can use these filters to find specific data within that particular report as needed.  Profile filters, on the other hand, are used to do things to the data that’s coming into Google Analytics to alter it permanently - we’ll be looking at these a bit later.

Some reports contain so much data that finding what you need is a like the proverbial needle in a haystack.  This is where inline filters come into play.  When the list of data returned is longer than you have patience for scrolling through, or you only want to view a subset of data you can narrow your data down by using the “Find” filter box.

There are two ways you can enter filter criteria into this field.  In each case you need to first decide whether you want to filter your report by including certain data or excluding it by selecting “containing” or “excluding” from the drop down box.  Then just pop in your filter term(s) in plain English and click “Go.”

The image below shows the before and after results of a filter.  Notice that your list of items in the report has been filtered down and the data along the top (visits, Pages/Visit, etc.) is representative only of the data set being shown after your filter is applied.

Another option is to use regular expressions in your filter.  To do this, just select “containing” or “excluding” and then enter your regular expression and click “Go.”  Your data will be filtered down to just what you need making it easier to analyze and manage.  In the example below, we might use a regular expression to find referring sites like “images.google.com.”

Up Next: Specific Reports – Rows of Data