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Google Analytics Definition
Google Analytics the plenty of tools and services for measuring useful statistics when researching websites.
It is often surprised to see people choose expensive tools with limited capability over Google Analytics.
Google Analytics feature set undoubtedly appears a bit daunting still if you invest a little time learning about it.
And Google Analytics, a valuable tool for user experience designers. As a bonus, many sites already have it installed.
It means that if you’re walking into a new project, you might already have a plethora of historical data waiting to be analyzed.
How to Use the different Data Views?
- In many of Google Analytics’ reports, it’s possible to switch the presentation of data. Sometimes, it useful for viewing data in an ideal way.
- While other times a different view can reveal entirely new information about a website, and switching views is straightforward.
- It’s directly below the date range area of a report. We notice a set of buttons that tab through the table, percentage, performance, comparison, and Pivot views on the page’s right side.
1. Table view
- The Table view is typically the standard data view when going over statistics. This view organizes data in a very straightforward spreadsheet-like manner.
- Its view is useful as a general overview for many types of values for specific dimensions. For example, on the default Top Content page (Content → Top Content).
- It’s possible to digest Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, Avg easily. Time on Page, Bounce Rate, etc., for individual pages on a website.
2. Percentage view
- Sometimes it’s easier to understand sets of data using visual tools like pie charts with the percentage view. It’s also possible to get a good idea of how values stack up against each other in just a glance.
- In the example below, Mobile Devices views in the Percentage view. We take to order the items by Visits and take told Google Analytics to calculate the percentage of each mobile device’s total time.
- In other words, in just a glance, we can see that iPhone, iPad, and Android users account for over 75% of the total time mobile users spend on this site.
3. Performance view
- Performance view extra tool for visualizing data. It’s useful for analyzing some metrics where the Percentage view fails to do so.
- For example, its capacity makes sense to use the Percentage view to visualize the total number of visits to the website from different referrers.
- However, if we wanted to see Pages per Visit, the Performance view would be ideal for presenting that data.
4. Comparison view
- The Comparison view is a handy visualization for comparing data against each other with this data view.
- It’s possible to quickly visualize scenarios like: “What is the bounce rate of a page compared to the site average?”.
- What is the average time spent on a page compared to the site average? Or even “How many users are browsing using an iPad compared to this month last year?”.
- By default, the Comparison view compares metrics against a site’s average for that particular metric. Still, it also compares against the history of your site if you enable the “Compare to Past in the Date Range section of Google Analytics.
5. Pivot view
- The Pivot view a unique way to view multiple dimensions of data at once, which can be especially useful for finding otherwise hard-to-spot trends.
- For instance, it’s Pivot by Source and then views Avg. Time on Site & Pages/Visit from different sources to specific landing pages.
- It is also useful in seeing what landing pages are most successful for specific sources and which landing pages need work (or should be avoided) from particular sources.