- [Instructor] One of the most interesting things
to consider about our visitors is simply where they're from
geographically speaking, when they're visiting our site.
And we consider this segment all the time
in the offline world, but it's a little bit trickier
on the web where content is accessible
to the whole world with ease.
Google uses some pretty sophisticated technology
to determine as accurately as possible
where the geographic location of your user is,
and they record that data as part of the visit.
So let's come here and navigate to these particular reports.
We're in the audience reports under Geo, on Location.
Here we see a graphical representation
of a map of the world.
And the metric we're evaluating currently is users,
although we can change this to what we like.
And the darker areas here represent more users in this case.
You can see down here in the legend, the lighter areas here
are one user and the darkest represent 26,000 users
for this particular time period.
Now we see this dark, but if we scroll down
we see a data table that's gonna give us
the exact same information, of course,
quite a bit more from a metrics point of view.
We've got our standard acquisition,
behavior and conversion metrics.
Now if we go up here, within these countries
we can drill down.
So if I click on the United States,
it's gonna blow up this map of the United States,
and then my thing that I can drill down to here
are the individual states.
So again we'll see the data table down here
is going to be updated to reflect that
and then if I were to click into a particular state,
I'm going to see that state blown up
and then the individual metro regions.
Now what I can see on the map here is that these
are heavily located around the San Francisco Bay Area,
and of course if I scroll down that's exactly what I see.
San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Mountain View,
San Jose, Palo Alto, Santa Clara.
Those are all bay area cities.
Now if I want to pop that back up I can come back here
and click on country, and it will go back up
to that higher view.
Now looking at this data table down here,
one of the things I can't help but notice
is states with the largest populations
are also the states with the most users.
California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida.
So it kinda makes sense if you have the most population,
you're more likely to have more users.
So that's kind of just a thing we have to understand
when we're looking at overall user quantity.
But we could take this to a per user metric.
For example, one of the things we could look at
would be like Per Session Value, this is going to tell us
how much people are spending per session
regardless of the overall number.
And here we see a very different one.
California is not nearly as dark here.
In fact, it's a tinge darker than the rest,
but we see for example, Virginia sticks way out here, $42.
And that may be interesting because if people
are spending a lot per session and we can do things
like pay-per-click marketing,
where we're gonna pay for each session,
this may be really interesting to know.
We could also take this to look at engagements.
So maybe we looked at something like duration.
So Average Session Duration.
And then what we see here,
the one that really sticks out, Vermont.
Now there's some very engaged users here from Vermont.
Which is interesting, because what I remember
what we saw of the users, was Vermont was nowhere in here.
In fact, if we put this down to show all the states,
Vermont is down here absolutely dead last.
So even though they have very few users,
the users who do come are super engaged.
Now as potentially illuminating as these geo-reports can be,
One limitation we have to be aware of
is that it's by no means 100% accurate.
If you're connecting through a network,
such as a corporate VPN, then the address that Google sees
may be located in an entirely different city,
such as the headquarters of your company
rather than where you're currently located
when you started the session.
So that can be a false location.
It's also possible Google is simply unable to figure out
where the visitor is located,
so it didn't know where to put it in.
This is where you may see a not set in the data table.
User location is simply not able to be determined.
As we see here, the 10th highest one on here
is not a state at all, in fact it's not set.
What that means is that they were able to figure out
that it was somewhere in the United States,
but were not able to locate it to a particular state.
Now overall, the geo-location report
can be a fantastic source of information,
once we learn to get past the less useful aggregate metrics
and into those details where the true insights lie.