Understanding reports

- [Instructor] We're going to be spending the majority of this course exploring what are known as Reports. Google organizes all of the data it's gathered into a collection of reports and these reports are specific to a particular theme. So, you'll find a report that summarizes your traffic, one that outlines where your visitors came from, another that focuses on content, and so on and so forth. These reports are the bread and butter of Google Analytics and it's what makes the platform so valuable. Later in this course, we'll be looking at key reports in a detailed manner and we'll be discussing how to use each one, what it's used for, and ways that you can leverage them to meet your business objective.

While we can't cover every report, you'll find that once you learn the mechanics of how they work, it's fairly straightforward to use all the others. So, let's talk about the types of reports we're going to encounter together. Now I'm already logged in to Google Analytics and I'm using the Google Merchandise Store Demo Account data that we installed earlier. Now it's here on the left-hand side that we have all of our reports. Now, the AUDIENCE section was opened, but I clicked on it to close it so that we can look at the categories of these reports.

At the very top, we have REAL-TIME, followed by AUDIENCE, ACQUISITION, BEHAVIOR, AND CONVERSIONS. Again, as we saw earlier, tapping into any of these sections will expand the reports that are available to you, and some of these sections also contain subsections that you can click into to view those specific reports as well. Now, as you'll see, there are a lot of reports, so take a minute to explore these and view all of the options available to you. Let's rewind and talk about these core categories so you understand what we're going to be getting ourselves into.

First, we have your Audience Reports. Here you'll see insight into the characteristics of your audience, who they are, what devices they're using, their interests, and even their location. Next, we'll talk about Acquisition Reports, and this is where you'll find information on how you acquired your users and from where. It's here you can identify what sources referred traffic, such as ad words, social, search, or any custom campaigns that you've set up. From there, we'll look at Behavior Reports, and this is how your users interact with your website, everything from the content to how they flow between all of the pages.

You'll have access to reports on how fast your site loads, custom events you're monitoring, and any experiments you're conducting. And finally, we have Conversion Reports, and this really demonstrates how all of your channels work together to drive your goals and your sales. As we work through each section, you'll get a better understanding of how we can leverage all of this information in a palatable and actionable manner, but for now, I just want you to be familiar with the names of these reports and where they're located.