- [Instructor] Let's go over some basics
on navigating around the Google Analytics platform.
When you log into Google Analytics,
you're going to be greeted with this home screen.
As we went over before,
you can come up here in this dropdown,
and you can select the account, property, and view
that you wish to analyze here.
Now, you can also come up here, select your favorites.
That's going to be whether or not you toggled on
or off this star or just some of the recent views
if you tend to access the same ones.
Or lastly, you can simply search here
if you know the name of the view you'd like to see.
Another option though, it's a little bit hidden,
is to come up here
and click this icon here in the top left.
And that's going to show you all in one screen
this account, property, and views.
And it's the same info we just saw before
but in a slightly differently way.
And just for me personally, I tend to like this one better.
It just makes sense to me
that there's this hierarchal nesting of folders.
But whatever works for you,
you can pick the view that you want to access.
Now, we navigate the interface here using the tabs
on this left-hand panel.
This panel can open and close
with this arrow down here at the bottom
if you need a little bit more space for your dashboard
or if you want to drill down in and expand those out.
Now, if we do have this closed,
I'm going to point out that if you hover over these
it will give you the names.
And then when you click on them,
it'll expand that out for you.
So let's go ahead and keep that expanded
and kind of come up here to the top.
We see another search bar,
and this one is specifically for reports
and content that you're going to view in this main dashboard.
So once again, this is helpful
if you know the exact report you'd like to analyze
and you want to save yourself the trouble of toggling
and drilling down into those reports and subreports.
So for example, if I want to view data
on traffic coming in from different channels,
I can just come in here and type channels.
It's going to show me the reports that match that word,
and I can click directly into those.
It'll actually open the panels over here
directly to that report and highlight that.
Coming down here from the search bar is the home tab.
Now, this is going to be a general dashboard.
Google's created this for you.
It's going to feature a digest
of some of the most important things going on in your site.
It's going to display some important metrics
like users and revenue and a real-time report widget
and some more insights regarding your users
and the overall performance of your site.
On the right side of this home tab,
you can come up here and click this little insights panel.
This is going to have an intelligence report.
It's going to share some interesting insights
about how your site's performing,
and it can be useful to scroll through here
and see what interesting tidbits Google's algorithms have
unearthed about your site performance.
For example, we see here it's found a site speed issue,
that a top page is actually loading slower now
and give you a bit more information about that.
Coming back to the main dashboard here and scrolling down,
we're going to see some pre-created dashboards
designed to address some of the most common questions
that marketers might have.
And I think this is actually a really good place to start.
If you look through here,
so how do you acquire your users?
How are your active users trending over time?
How well do you retain your users?
When they come, when do they actually visit,
and where are they coming from?
What are the top devices they're using and so on?
If you're brand new to digital analytics,
I suggest you pause here and have a closer study
of each one of these to really familiarize yourself
with the type of data that Google Analytics can offer.
Okay, moving on in our tour of the navigation,
come back here.
The next one down here is customization.
Now because deeper customizations
of platform aren't truly essential,
we're not going to go over these in depth.
However, I want to point this out
as an area for you to come back to and explore
once you get your foundation established
as it's a pretty handy feature
once you become that power user.
Okay, let's head down here to the actual reports section,
where all of the built-in reports
of this particular view reside.
Here, we should be able to access the realtime,
audience, behavior, and conversion reports.
In this course, we're going to spend a lot of time here.
We're going to cover all the widely-used reports
in this entire section and how you can leverage them
and really find insights from those
to improve and customize your site.
Down here towards the bottom,
we're going to see a beta for attribution
and importantly the admin tab.
Now, we briefly gone through the admin tab
in previous videos, so we know it's here.
And we can adjust all the settings
for the accounts, properties, and views.
One thing to note is you don't always have access
to all of these settings.
In a later chapter, we're going to go over
how to manage the user permissions here in the admin page.
Some of these features may or may not show up for you
if you don't have all of the different permission levels.
Other functions here in the admin include
linking your properties to other Google products,
setting goals, configuring filters,
and how to manage your individual user settings here
on the top left corner.
And with that, we've gone over the basic layout
of the Google Analytics interface.
And you should now be able to navigate safely
across the platform.