In order to use the Analytics Summary report to gain insights about your website traffic, you'll first need to give the platform authorization to connect to your Google account. To begin the setup process, click Set Up Google Analytics.
This will bring you to a Google sign-in page where you'll have to login and choose which site you'd like to connect with the platform. Once you've completed this setup process, you'll be redirected to the Analytics Summary report.
Note: It may take some time for the Analytics Summary report to load once you've first connected your profile.
Once the platform loads your Google Analytics data, you'll be able to see a wealth of new information. Let's start at the top right by clicking on Report Settings so we can ensure the report is tracking conversions properly. The Report Settings pop-up window allows you to change the Google Analytics profile associated with your campaign or to change the metric you would like to see for conversions in your campaign (goals, transactions, or goals+transactions).
The first section of the report gives you a graphical representation of the three major traffic metrics (sessions, users, and page views). By default, the report will show the total number of sessions on a daily time scale. You can change the metric using the dropdown menu to the top left of the graph or change the time scale using the selectors to the top right.
Below these graphs, the Analytics Summary report provides you with more specific data about your total number of visitors. You can see how many visitors were new, how many were returning visitors, and how the percentages of both break down.
The Channel Overview section gives you up to date information about how your visitors are finding your site. Are users finding your site via organic search? Or are they simply typing in your URL directly? Did your last email newsletter generate traffic for your site? These are all insights you can gain from this section of the Analytics Summary report.
The Popular Pages section displays the most frequently visited pages on your site, allowing you to learn from your successes and fine tune your SEO strategy moving forward.
The Device Overview section is one of the most important areas of the Analytics Summary report, especially with recent changes to Google's search algorithm creating a more mobile-centric SEO landscape. This section provides insights into how your users view your site. You can then use this data to optimize your site's user experience and overall design.
The final section includes an Organic Traffic Analysis as well as a Social Media Traffic Analysis. This allows you to better understand which search engines and social networks are driving clicks to your site (e.g. if Bing is driving a ton of traffic, you may want to focus more on optimizing for Bing, since that's how your users are finding you online!).