Google Analytics™ Third Edition

Chapter 5. Account Dashboard Basics

One feature of Google Analytics not only sets it apart from other analytics programs (such as AWStats) but also makes it much more valuable to the user. This feature is the graphic nature of the reports pages. Each report enables you to quickly see what the report is designed to tell you. At a glance you can see a metric that's meaningful and that you can use to determine the next action that you should take with your web site.

That graphic nature extends to the dashboard that you see when you first sign into a web-site profile. As you saw in Chapter 4, the Analytics Settings dashboard is pretty simple. Nothing like the dashboard that you'll encounter once you step one level deeper into Google Analytics.

Navigating from the Dashboard

When you first log in to a web-site profile, the default dashboard for that profile is displayed. On this default dashboard, shown in Figure 5-1, several reports are already added, but the one report on this page that cannot be removed is the top one, Site Usage. It's anchored at the top and cannot be replaced or moved. The controls for date ranges are also at the top of the page and cannot be moved. We'll cover date ranges near the end of this chapter.

Finally, you'll find advanced segmentation options anchored to the top of the page as well. This feature is still in beta testing at the time of this writing, but that doesn't mean it's without value. In fact, you should look closely at the segmentation capabilities in ...