PE: Quick Guide to Google Analytics

This article will be an overview of some of what I personally find to be the most interesting features that are now available to Premium Members through Google Analytics. If you have not yet set up Google Analytics on your profile or do not know what it is, please see the following journals made by dA Staff:

Google Analytics For Your deviantART ProfilePremium Members can now use Google Analytics to get meaningful insight about the traffic to their deviantART Profile! Using our new Google Analytics integration, you can access comprehensive statistics about your audience, traffic, and art.
Get Deeper Insight Into Your deviantART Traffic
By enabling the feature on your profile, you can now use Google Analytics to get a better grasp on the deviantART experience that you’ve created for your audience!
Understand what types of people are organically drawn to your work. Where do they live? How long are they on your page?
See the impact of the marketing you do outside of deviantART. When you share your deviantART work and links in other networks and sites, you’ll be able to track the traffic back to your Journals, Gallery, Profile, and much more!
Understand what your visitors are looking at when they’re on your Profile an  How To Set Up Google AnalyticsPremium Members can now use Google Analytics to get meaningful insight about the traffic to their deviantART Profile! Using our new Google Analytics integration, you can access comprehensive statistics about your audience, traffic, and art.
Learn more about how you can benefit from Google Analytics on you deviantART Profile.
Set Up Analytics For Your Profile
To set up Google Analytics for your profile, you will need to allow Google Analytics to start tracking your profile:
Visit the new "Google Analytics" near the bottom of your General SettingsClick "Where do I find my Analytics ID?" and follow the instructions on how to set up your Google Analytics account.Follow the instructions on how to find your Google Analytics Tracking ID.Insert your Tracking ID and click save. Google An


Real-Time > Overview shows statistics of current visitors. While this page is interesting to look at ("Hey look, someone from Alaska is visiting my page right now!"), most people probably won't have enough live visitors at one point to find this page particularly useful.




The first page I always check is the Audience > Overview page which gives a nice, condensed summary of some of the most important statistics of the site.

Basic Terms Explained:

• Visits: Number of times people visit your profile page or artworks. More Info
• Unique Visitors: Unduplicated (counted only once) visitors. A low unique visitor count in comparison to the visit count means that many of the same people are viewing your pages. In contrast, a high unique visitor count means that most people are only viewing your pages once. More Info
• Page Views: The total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of the same page are counted.
• Pages/Visits: The average number of pages that people view per visit. A higher number here means that people tend to view more pages every time they visit.
• Average Visit Duration: How long people tend to visit your pages for.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits (or the number of people who view one page and then "bounce off" to a different page). A lower bounce rate means that people who view one of your pages are kept interested enough to visit more of your pages.
• Percent New Visits: How many visits are first-time visits.

Location:

One of my favorite pages to look at is Audience > Geo > Location which shows the location of all of your visitors. The default page will show visitors by country:



You can also switch the Primary Dimension to City instead of Country/Territory to view the number of visitors per city. Hovering over each of the dots will show you what city it represents as well as the number of visits from that city.

Channels

The Acquisition > Channels page shows which pages your visitors are coming from.

Types of Channels:

• Social: Visits coming from social media websites such as DeviantART, Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube.
  
• Direct: Visits coming directly from one of your own pages (your profile or artworks)
  
• Organic Search: Search words that were used to find your pages.
  
• Referral: The referrals here refer to visits coming from other websites (not including social media sites)
  

For more details on each of these, make sure to click their blue links in the table.

Organic Searches:

You can access the Search Keyword page by clicking the Organic Search link from Acquisition > Channels or through Acquisition > Keywords > Organic. Most of the search words are unfortunately shown only as "(not provided)", but other keywords can show you what searches have led people to your pages.

Referrals:

The Acquisition > All Referrals shows which pages most of your visitors are coming from. For most deviants, this list will primarily consist of other pages on DeviantART. For me, the chart shows that most of my visitors are coming from dA itself, CustomizeYourProfile, CypherVisor, and Rising-Artists.


Note: To see more results on the charts of Google Analytics, you can always change the number of rows shown here or flip the pages here. ^

You can also click on each of the blue links on the chart to receive a more detailed chart of your referrals. For example, the first deviantart.com link leads me to the following page, which shows me in more depth where my visitors are coming from:



And there's the brief overview of Google Analytics. Please keep in mind that I've only covered some of the main features that Google Analytics offers. There are many more features that you can utilize, so I suggest hunting around a bit on your own to find your favorite features.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you found this article useful!