Understanding Google Analytics
As a followup to the post about our new stats tool, we thought it would be helpful to explain how to read and understand Google Analytics. If you’ve seen it even briefly, you know it’s quite a complicated thing, but with a little bit an explanation it can become a lot easier to use. And once you get it, it can give you an incredible amount of insight into who your visitors are, where they’re coming from, and how engaged they are on your site.
To view Google Analytics on your Clover site, you need to enable it through the “Google Settings” page on your dashboard. I’m going to assume that you’ve already done this and that it’s been activated long enough to have some meaningful data.
The best part about Google Analytics is also the worst part: it tracks soooo much. You’d need a PhD in statistics to fully understand it all, but knowing even a few of the highlights can be really useful.
The first thing to understand is that every piece of information you see is from a specific time span. By default, it shows data from the last 30 days, but if you adjust the date range in the upper right, everything you view from that point on will be specific to the dates you selected.
Here are some of the things you can see with Google Analytics:
Visits
This is the first thing you see on the analytics dashboard, and it’s the same thing Clover tracks for you. It’s the number of visits on each day, which is a pretty straightforward way to see how often people are visiting your site.
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