Google Analytics Report Types

Google Analytics Visitors Reports

Overview of Analytics Visitors Reports

Objective: Read about the different kinds of visitors reports available in Google Analytics to learn how to leverage the information for your marketing objectives.

Interpreting Visitors Reports

Visitors Overview: How many new and returning visitors came to your site and how extensively did they interact with your content? This traffic overview allows you to drill down into aspects of visit quality (i.e. average pageviews, time on site, Bounce Rate) and visit characteristics (i.e. first time visitors, returning visits).

New vs. Returning: A high number of new visitors suggests that you are successful at driving traffic to your site while a high number of return visitors suggests that the site content is engaging enough to keep visitors coming back. You can see how frequently visitors return and how many times they return in 'Recency' report and the 'Loyalty report,' both under 'New vs. Returning' in the Visitors section.

Map Overlay: Use this map to visualize volume (visits, pageviews) and quality (pageviews per visit, conversion rates, per visit value, etc.) metrics by geographic region. Click on any region to zoom into the city level.

Languages: Which languages do your visitors prefer to use and how do these groups of visitors differ with respect to site usage, conversions, and other metrics? This report captures the preferred language that visitors have configured on their computers. Understanding who your visitors are is crucial to developing the right content and optimizing your marketing spend. Many times, geo-location is not enough. Many countries have diverse populations speaking different languages which present important market targeting opportunities.

Visitor Trending: The reports in this category help you determine how your visitors engage with your site, in addition to telling you how many of them visited.

Visitor Loyalty: Loyal visitors are frequently highly engaged with your brand and a high number of multiple visits indicates good customer/visitor retention. A high number of new visitors indicates strong visitor recruitment.

Browser Capabilities: Which browsers do your visitors use? Optimizing your site for the appropriate technical capabilities helps make your site more engaging and usable and can result in higher conversion rates and more sales.

Network Properties: Which Internet service provider, hostname, and connection speed drove the most visits to your site? Hostnames can sometimes offer insight into which organizations are interested in your site, while connection speed can help you optimize your site so that it loads quickly for a majority of your visitors.

User Defined: This report allows you to compare visitors from custom segments that you have defined. You define these segments by calling the utm_setvar function in your website code. For example, if visitors fill out a form on your site in which they provide a professional title (such as "manager," "technical specialist," "marketer"), you can call utm_setvar to capture and store their selections in the user defined variable.