Google Analytics Tutorial 3: Digging Deeper
At long last, here’s installment 3 of my Google Analytics tutorials.
Please excuse some very choppy editing – I had to get rid of various coughs, sneezes and other viral sounds you just didn’t need to hear.
In it, I talk about the analysis menu and using it to:
- Learn where people who view a specific page come from.
- Learn where those people go afterwards.
- Figure out what changes you might want to make.
This is a very preliminary look at these kinds of challenges. Future tutorials will go into more depth.
Important: A reader found an error in this tutorial. Please read this entry as a note: Click Here.
You can download the Quicktime version here.
The other tutorials:
Google Analytics Tutorial 1: Setting Up
Google Analytics Tutorial 2: Essential Stats
Google Analytics Tutorial 4: Goals
Google Analytics Tutorial 5: Search Analytics
Portent's Founder & CEO
Ian Lurie is founder and CEO of Portent Inc., an internet marketing agency that has provided internet marketing, including PPC, SEO, social and analytics services, since 1995. more >
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Hi Ian,
I was wondering if you could explain how Google Analytics tracks views from RSS feed subscriptions.
Also, the Veoh.com video clip for tutorial 3 was not visible in my blog feed reader (Thunderbird). You may want to include a direct link to that as well. Thanks for the great posts.
- Nick
A very neat tutorial.
Can you also give us some insight of the goal tracking capabilities on Google analytics ?
-Sandhya
Hi Sandhya,
I’ve had a bunch of requests for the goals stuff. I was going to do it in a few weeks, but I’m going to change the schedule and do one on goals setup and the principle behind goals today.
Thanks!
Ian
Hi Ian.
Quick question:
When I was looking at the Analysis Options for the content of the referring source to find which pages the referred visitors were coming into my blog; I found the blogposts that they were referred from. Only when I clicked on the referrals from my homepage did I determine what posts they came in on from my blog…
I looked at a # of referring source ‘content’ pages and the same data occurs.
Much thanks for another highly-informative tutorial.
~ Ponn
Great tutorial! You were the first blog I found that explained how to see the referring sources for individual pages. I definitely added you to my Google Reader feeds ;)
Really excellent tutorial(s)!!! I look forward to the upcoming ones.
I would like to know if there is any way to see in GA how visitors are navigating. It’s great to see referals, keywords etc, but what if I want to know what visitors do once they get onto the site? For example, do they click on a banner, then find a product and then make a purchase. Do they browse through some categories and then exit because they get bored? I know the siteoverlay shows some of this information, but you can’t see the info all in one place.
Hi JJ,
I posted a supplement that may help here:
http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2007/05/navigation_analysis_with_googl.htm
when I installed google analytics I get a screen that looks different from your tutorial screen. It does not give me the ability to change my view and has much more limited stats .. why is this and how can I change it?
Since GA has updated their interface, I can’t see how it’s possible to track where visitors from a particular referring website go on your site — as you did in this tutorial with the old interface.
Could you do an update on this video tutorial showing these same tasks with the new GA interface? Pretty please?
Hi Rachel,
I’m working on it :)
In the mean time, you have two options:
1. You can click on the referrer, then choose ‘landing page’ under ‘segment’. That’ll tell you the page they landed one.
2. You can go into the ‘content’ report, click on a page, and then click ‘source’.
I’ll go into more detail in my next tutorial.