3.3 Full Report
Next, we’ll take a look at a full report:
- From the menu on the left, below Audience, click Geo followed by Location. The Location report is displayed.
- By default, the report includes a map overlay showing where your site’s visitors are located. To change this to a line graph, click the Explorer tab (labelled ‘2’ in example below).
- Click the links above the data table to change the dimension shown in the first column from ‘Country’ to either city, continent or subcontinent.
You can also add a secondary dimension to the table for more specific analysis. For example, you could add a secondary dimension of ‘device category’ to the report to see what kinds of devices were used by people in different countries while visiting your website.
To do this:
Click the Secondary Dimension drop-down box, and then type ‘device’ into the search box. You can now click Device Category.
The report now shows what kind of devices were used by people in different countries.
The above numbers relate to aspects that are common to many reports.
They are described below, and you can investigate each area yourself through Google Analytics…
1. Show Rows
The ‘Show rows’ dropdown menu on the bottom-right side of the table to select how many rows you want to see, or use the left and right arrows to scroll through 10 rows at a time.
2. Sort Table Data
Clicking on a column in the table toggles the data sort between ascending and descending.
3. Filter Table Data
Use the filter field to include only rows where the primary dimension contains your filter term. For example, you may want to look at data for a specific country like India, so rather than scroll through the table, you could simply type “India” into the filter field. The ‘Advanced’ option next to the search box, lets you apply more sophisticated rules for filtering.
4. Visualisation Options
There are several visualization options:
- Data table – the default visualization for most reports. This organizes your data in a table broken out by acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics for the audience and acquisition reports.
- Pie chart – creates a pie chart based on your data. This helps you compare the percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. You can choose which metric from your report should display in the pie chart using the pulldown menu.
- Performance view – shows a bar graph of your data. This helps you compare individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic. You can also use the pull-down menu to select various metrics to be represented as bars.
- Comparison view – shows you a bar graph to quickly see whether each entry in the table is performing above or below the site average for the selected metric. If the value for a given row is better than average, it appears green. If it’s below average, it appears red. Again, you can use the drop-down menu to select which metric should be displayed.
- Pivot view – creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show different dimension values for comparison. For example, a pivot table could show The Google Store the bounce rate and number of sessions for each landing page and device type.