If I click on home icon here, it takes me to the page that we started at. This page here just shows how many sites are linked to the analytics account. Now if I click on customization here, it allows me to create custom reports. Custom reports are basically summaries of all the analytics data and you choose which data you want to be a part of the report. Whatever you feel is important or whatever you are concentrating on. If it is made the right way, these reports can be incredible time savers.
Now this account doesn’t have any custom reports created but I am going to show you how to make one right now. So, first thing first, you click on new custom report, you give your report a name and I am going to name mine traffic summary, then you want to choose your report type and for this you have three options explorer, flat table and map overlay. I am going to go with flat table. So, it is going to give me my information in tabular form. Then I am going to choose dimensions and metric. Now a dimension is like a descriptive characteristic and a metric is like an individual element. myskywings.online
They are related in the sense that metrics are individual elements of dimensions. So dimensions are often associated with one or more metric. So, I am going to go ahead and choose them and you are definitely going to understand dimensions and metrics in more depth after I am done choosing them. So, I am going to add metrics first. I am going to add page views plus add unique visitors. So, I am done adding my metrics, I am going to add my dimensions, I am going to add source and let’s add country.
So, these dimensions and metrics are going to be a part of my flat table. And an easy way to explain this is that the metrics are going to be like the columns of the table and the dimensions are going to be like the rows. So, basically I am going to have a lot of information about the page views, unique visitors, and how much time the visitors are spending on the page, all of that based on the source where they are coming from and the country where they are coming from.
But you will understand that in more detail once I click save and the table is generated. You can also add a filter if you like, it will help out in leaving out things that you don’t want, in case you don’t want all of the data to be a part of the table. So, once you are done adding your filter if you want that and all your dimensions and metrics you will click on save and it’s going to give you your report.
So, here in the table I have my two dimensions, source and country and then I have all the metrics, page views, unique visitors, average time on page and bounce rate. So, basically it shows me all the metrics for the different countries that they are coming from and the sources that they are coming from. So, now that you know how to generate a custom report, we are going to move on to the admin tab. You can have access to information such as account and property and these are more important to the actual owner of the blog so you can access things such as your account settings, your property settings and all that.
But what I mainly want to talk to you about is all the information over here. So, if you click on view settings over here you can see some information regarding time zone of your blog, e-commerce settings and site search tracking etcetera. But I am not going to click on it because it has some confidential information such as the view ID, so I am going to skip that part.
You can also check out the goals and the filters area but there aren’t any set for this account at the moment, but maybe you can just add some goals which are just the main things that you want your visitors to do. And it’s a good way to measure how many times a visitor completes one of your goals and a conversion takes place.
Filters over here allow you to limit specific data that you don’t want to be part of the report. Below that we have personal tools and assets. So, we have segments over here which allows you to isolate specific types of traffic within your Google Analytics reporting. Then we have annotations. And they are mainly for letting users leave notes on the graphs so you can mark important happenings according to the date on which they happen. So. let’s create an annotation right now.
We are going to go back to the reporting tab and I am going to create annotation for the month with the highest traffic. So, Troy’s blog was actually started in June 2010, but he didn’t make an analytics account until January 2013. So, I am going to set this date to January 2013, it is going to be a custom date and it is going to be till February 2014. And I am going to set this to month. So, traffic wise his highest month was in October 2013 and it had 1421 visits. So, to create an annotation I am just going to click on this arrow below here and I am going to click on create new annotation. So, this is going to be for October.
I am going to click on October, I am going to have to click on that again. So, it is set for the 1st of October 2013 and I am just going to write highest traffic till present. And that is beginning of February 2014 and then you are just going to click on save. And that’s how you make an annotation. So, I am going to go back to the admin area and there is our annotation.
Highest traffic till present. And the next thing we have to discuss is attribution models. The attribution modeling is an intense topic and also a very broad topic. So, I am not going to go into too much detail here, I am planning on making a separate video for that but I am going to give an introduction.
