There are a large number of dimensions and metrics recorded by Google Analytics, and each of them provides some unique insight into your web site visitors and their behaviour. When looking at the visitors, it helps to build a profile of where they are from, how they came to your site and what they used to view your web pages. Since we are focussing on the people at this point, then we should be using the number of visits as our metric.

For each chosen dimension, it is interesting to see the top 5, top 10, or even top 20 list since those attributes best characterize your visitors, but you can’t rely on just that. Since the web is a highly dynamic place with plenty of unforeseen influences, your top lists can change significantly if you selected a slightly different time period. For this reason, you should always include a trend chart for your top measures.

Some common dimensions worth reviewing:

By Country – the internet is truly global, and traffic can suddenly appear from anywhere. As a middle-of-the-pack location dimension, tracking visits by country makes it possible to see any sudden spikes or dips from unexpected locations. Is this a market you are targeting? Should you consider changes?

By Network Domain – a little tighter focus, seeing the top domains is most valuable when you have corporate clients with their own domain names. An indication of interest from a product or service perspective, this information is worth sharing with your sales and support teams.

By Medium – often overlooked as a dimension with little to show, the order of visit by medium is a clean indication of whether your site is thriving on its own name through direct or organic searches, or how heavily you rely on referrals and paid advertising.

By Source – although the top handful are not likely news to anyone, seeing the rest of the top 20 can provide some insight into blogs or other references to your site that have appeared on the web. It is always good to know what others are saying about you, and it may be worthwhile posting a comment to offset any negativity.

By Browser/Operating System/Connection Speed – as your site must cater to a changing audience, your site designers need to know what devices people are using to view your web pages. I know I was surprised when ‘Nintendo Wii’ first showed up!

Using Nextanalytics, we built a sampling of visitor profile reports as an illustration – the templates can be downloaded from the link on this page. Each of the reports was built by selecting the date, the dimension of interest (country in this example) and the number of visits from the Google Analytics query interface. We chose a 14 day period to give us a good view of the recent activity.

Viewing all 14 days of our trend report, we can add a total column and sort it in descending order with a couple of clicks – that gives us the top countries in order for the entire 14 day period to use in our top 20 list, while keeping the daily totals for each row to use in our trend chart.

At this point, making a useful report is simple Excel functionality, referencing our ‘data’ worksheet for the top 20 list, and selecting the top 6 countries for inclusion in a trend chart. Since the query used a rolling period (Past 14 days) instead of fixed dates, the report can be refreshed daily just by clicking the Nextanalytics Refresh button.

With just a few minutes of effort, we can easily create a series of similar reports and consolidate them onto a single ‘dashboard’ worksheet suitable for distribution. With one-click refresh, this can automate this basic portion of our weekly reporting efforts, freeing up time for higher value activities.