Send yourself (and/or your boss) an email on the first of every month with the number of visitors, unique visitors, pageviews, and what city your traffic comes from. It will take you an hour to set the whole thing up if you’ve never done any of these steps before, and much less time if you have.
Steps you need to take to get ready (that you may have already done)
- Register your yale email address with gmail.com. (Time estimate: two minutes if you haven't done this already)
- Ask the Web Group to give you user access to Google Analytics.
- Set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics. Follow these instructions. (Time estimate: 20 minutes)
Now, onto making the report
These are specific instructions for this specific report (see the sample report here), but you can go ahead and create as many as you like to all be attached to the same email later on (don't send multiple emails! You can attach all the reports to just one monthly email).
- Your Google Analytics report defaults to the last month’s activity for the “Audience Overview,” which is exactly the high-level report we want. If you’ve been clicking around, just click the “Audience Overview” to the left.
- Scroll down to the little “Demographics” header and click the “City” link. This will display details about what city your web traffic comes from. You have to make this change to your report in order to make this detail show up in the monthly report.
- Scroll back up to the top of the page and click “Email.”
- In the pop-up:
- Fill out the “To” field with your email address (or whomever you’d like to receive this report);
- Change the “Attachments” to “PDF”;
- Change “Frequency” to “Monthly” and it will default to send on the 1st.
- Under “Advanced Options” you’ll note you can only make this active for up to 12 months.
- Add a little note, like “Hi! Here’s the monthly high-level web statistics report that details visitors, pageviews, and what cities we’re getting traffic from.”
- Click “Send.”
- The report you just created looks like this. Congratulations!
If you want to send additional reports, navigate to the statistics you want to see using the left navigation (like perhaps which pages are most popular under “Content”), you will notice that from now on when you click “Email” in the navigation, that pop-up has the link “Add to an existing email” in the lower right.
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