Many of my clients like to use Google analytics to search for user trends on their site. But, they often get a little lost as they navigate through the interface, and end up calling me to explain how to extract what they are looking for. I’ve found that the best place for many of them to start getting grounded in the details isn’t the default “Audience Overview” tab, It’s the “All Traffic” view. Let’s look at why:
As you can see above, there is a lot of good information rolled up here. Knowing that people spend about a minute on my site looks pretty bad on the surface. So, let’s try and figure out why that is.
If we drill in to the Traffic Sources>All Traffic view using the menu on the left:
This brings us to the good stuff 😉 A quick look at all of the traffic by source.
 Now, we can see that most of my traffic lately has been driven by people directly typing in my url, or from Facebook. This view is extremely helpful because it is a quick way to see the quality of your traffic by source. In my case, the linkedin and google organic traffic are sources I’d like to keep happy, while I need to work more on getting my facebook and direct customers to read more.
The all traffic view is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can get from analytics, but it is a great place to start for people who are new to it.
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