to make Google Analytics both easy to use,

but still incredibly powerful,

which can be a difficult balancing act.

Before we dive into the reports

and the analysis tools available,

let's discuss a few things about the Ecosystem

of Google Analytics itself.

The first thing to talk about is

how the levels of Google Analytics are nested,

at the top of the hierarchy is the Google Analytics account.

This is your login, your password to all

the Google services, Gmail, Hangouts, analytics ,ad-words

and so on.

As we've touched on before,

you create your Google Analytics account

with your overall Google user login,

and the difference between those two

can be a little bit confusing,

but it is important to know

that your account for Google Analytics is different

than your Google account.

Now, while you start with one Google Analytics account,

when you first begin using Google Analytics,

you can actually create numerous accounts,

all nested under that one Google account,

according to your business needs.

This account level usually serves as the entity

for an entire businesses analytics reporting.

So as long as you just have one single business,

you loan a report on,

we suggest you just stick

to that one account for the business,

but you may consider having access to several accounts.

If, for example,

your position requires analyzing multiple clients websites,

or like you see in this slide,

maybe you have one for your personal website

and maybe one for your company

and they're both tied back to your one account.

Or if your company has multiple brands

and you have multiple different sites

that are completely unique entities,

you could have different accounts for those as well.

Now, within an account is at least one property.

We generally recommend a business to have a property

for each website or platform

and by platform I mean, for example,

if you have both a website

and an application for your business,

like a mobile application,

you may have two properties

in that will report on each individual platform,

so, one for web, one for the mobile apps.

Now within each of those properties

there're something we call views,

views are really powerful

and advanced users are going to find all kinds

of ways to tweak them,

but they can be a little bit confusing at first,

think of each view, like a lens into that database

that can be configured completely independently

of the others.

For example, one view you may want to have data

from just California,

or maybe you have multiple country domains

that feed into this one account,

but you can create these views

that are going to separate out

just to your French site for example.

In some ways it's like you have a duplicate data set,

tracks that same site and all coming

from that one tracking code you put on,

but they can be configured completely differently.

And that goes for both the data

and for the permissions that

you're going to give users,

we'll see that in just a minute.

Now you can create up to 50 these views,

every web property should have at least three views.

If you're going to experiment and go down that row,

everyone should create at least these three.

So first, it's often useful to have a main reporting view

where you can do the majority of your analysis.

This can be the current one that creates for you.

Second, you should have a test view

where you can make some mistakes.

You can try new filters,

you can generally mess with things

and see what happens with no fear of hurting

your actual data.

So create that view that's just for testing.

Lastly, you're going to have a raw unfiltered view.

That's just a pristine data,

no filters on it whatsoever.

You captures all the data

and that way you can make sure

at least then you have all the data.

If you ever need to go back

and take a look at it,

because remember the data that comes through this view,

if you filter it, it's going to be processed

through that filter, way before it

even reaches your reporting interface.

And what that means is you can't go back

and revert the data back to its raw form

once you filtered it,

because of that, it's really the best practice

to have this unfiltered view

that acts as a bit of insurance policy

against any mistakes you might make in your main reporting

or particularly testing one,

you can always go back

and check that raw unfettered data.

Now let's move into the tool

and take a quick look at how we move across

these accounts, properties and views.

Have a go pure and click on here.

We have our accounts, we have our properties

and we have our views across here.

Now on the top, we can star a view.

We can go up here and click

and it'll show us our starred views.

Now, of course I only have one here

as well as our recent.

And it's a way we can organize

if you start getting lots of these inside of here,

if you want to create new properties and views,

we'll look at the admin section of it later,

but you can come over here

and create property three views.

So we talked about creating those three views

you could do so right here.

And lastly, we will talk about the search navigation here.

If you get quite a few these in here,

you can search through them

and filter that way as well.

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