Google Analytics – Executive View – Overview
The Executive View is the simplest of the three views. It displays four reports. The purpose of this view is to provide users with a high level overview of website usage.
All reports throughout Analtyics are controlled by the Date Range widget. By default, the Date Range is the last seven days. I find it helpful to look at stats by month. This makes it easy to do month to month comparisons.
Executive Overview
The Executive Overview Report displays four graphics, one in each quadrant of the main page.
The Visits and Pageviews graphic shows a line chart of website traffic. Vistitors are displayed in blue, pageviews in orange. This will probably be the most used graphic in the whole suite because it displays the essential information everyone wants to know: how much traffic. There is one thing that is very confusing about this chart. Visitors and Pageviews are NOT shown on the same scale. This came to my attention when I saw that pageviews for a particular day looked less then the amount of visitors. How could that be!?! Looking at the chart, on the left, under Visits, it displays a number. For example the number 500 might be displayed. On the right, under Pageviews it displays another number, say 1000. Each category is charted according to the scale indicated by that number. Thus a point in the middle of the graph would be around 250 if it is a Visitor dot, and around 500 if it is a Pageview dot. Personally, I prefer the way Statcounter presents this information, but I believe Analytics uses the dual scale in order to conserve space.
The key statistic to watch in this graph is pageview/vistitor ratio. This ratio is truly unique to a website. The key is to improve this ratio each month.
Visits by New and Returning is displayed as a pie chart. The bulk of visitors will be new. However, it is important to see what percentage of visitors do return to a site. This is particularly important over long date ranges.
Geo Map Overlay displays a map of the world, with a dots representing concentrations of your site visitors. Very easy and cool way to see countries and cities of origin.
Visit by Source shows a pie chart with each slice representing a source. This graph answers the question, how did my visitors find my website? Or to put it another way, this chart displays top referrals. Was it Google, Msn or Yahoo?
The Executive Overview will be the most used since it displays the most basic statistics.
The Marketer View Marketer Overview and the Webmaster View Webmaster Overview shows the exact same four graphs.
Posted by Paul Flyer on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 in Web Analytics
WebtrafficJunkie Says:
January 16th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
This is an amazing article. I learned a lot of great tips and pointers. Thanks for the information!!