Tracking Visitor Counts
“How many visits am I getting?” is everyone’s favorite Analytics question. Website optimization experts would argue that there are much better questions you can be asking, but since everyone wants to know, here's how you can find out!
Option 1: All pageviews
Go to the Behavior Overview in the main menu.
Here you can see a summary of the metrics that Google thinks are most useful.
These metrics are for the site as a whole, so if you only manage a portion of the site (which is probably the case if you work for Extension), you will probably want to dig a little deeper.
The table in the screenshot is showing individual pageviews. For example, you can see that hgic (the HGIC homepage) and hgic/weed/identification-photos (a specific page within the HGIC section) are both listed separately.
If you know the title of the page or pages you want data on, you can search for results for just that page.
Change “Primary dimension” to “Page Title”
In the search field above the results table, enter your search term.
In the example to the right, we’ve filtered the results to just pages with the word “Lantern” in the title.
Option 2: Content Drilldown
Another way of analyzing content is to look at all of the content belonging to a specific section of the site. This option is especially useful when you manage a section of a site (such as an Extension county) and only want to find statistics directly related to that section.
Go to Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown in the menu.
Content Drilldown uses URL paths to group content. When you are looking at a URL, the “Page Path Level 1” corresponds to everything after the site name and the first slash (In this example, that would be extension.umd.edu/), but before any second slash.
When viewing the Content Drilldown, all pages with the same Page Path Level 1 will be grouped together, and their individual pageviews will be added together for a sum total.
In the screenshot pictured here, the first grouping, “/hgic/” includes every page within the Home & Garden Information Center section (that is, every page with “hgic” as the first component of its URL path). All these pages together accounted for 354,000+ views over the month shown.
The count does not, however, include the HGIC homepage (which can be found at extension.umd.edu/hgic with no trailing slash). If you look farther down in the table, you can see that page gets its own separate row, and it only had 6,691 views.
The page paths in the drilldown report are clickable and will lead to additional reports.
So in this example, if you click on "/hgic/", you will be taken to another GA report, where you will see all the pages with paths that begin with "hgic/".
The screenshot to the right shows what you would see if you clicked on /hgic/ in the example above.
Now the primary dimension (that is, the main thing that GA is examining in this table) is "page path level 2," or whatever comes after extension.umd.edu/hgic/ in the page URL.
The slashes in the report give you a strong clue as to whether you are looking at data for a single page or a grouping of pages. A trailing slash indicates that there are more subpages, whereas the absence of a slash indicates you've reached the end of the line.
So "/lawns/" in the table is referring to all pages that begin with "extension.umd.edu/hgic/lawns/", but "/weeds" is referring to the single page at "extension.umd.edu/hgic/weeds".
You can continue clicking these links and "drill down" into the site to find the specific data you are looking for.
The difference between All Pages and Content Drilldown
To summarize...
The statistics given in the Content Drilldown are the summation of data for several pages containing that path element, but the stats in the All Pages report can only count one page at a time.