The Settings Dashboard

It’s one thing to collect data. Any web statistics program will do that. But to go
beyond gathering data to producing usable information —that’s something
completely different. While most analytics programs produce almost any kind
of data your heart could desire, they don’t make it easy to use. And if you can’t
figure out what the data mean, you can’t use that data to your benefit.

To produce meaningful data, even with the easiest of analytics programs,
you have to set up the program correctly. Set-up should be easy. The first dashboards, after all, were on horse-drawn buggies. Far from those horse-andbuggy
days, most professional analytics programs require experienced professionals to configure them. Google Analytics is strictly DIY, beginning with the simplest dashboards first. The more complex settings are no more than a few clicks deep.


Analytics Settings
When you log in to Google Analytics, the first page is the Analytics Settings
dashboard shown in Figure 5-1. This dashboard is your gateway to creating
and managing your profiles, controlling access to those profiles, and setting
filters.


The main (top) menu bar of the Analytics Settings dashboard has two basic
choices: Analytics Settings and View Reports. If you have more than one profile,
you can select which one you’d like to view from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 5-2. Otherwise, the default profile (whichever one you added first) will load when you click View Reports. Jerri has only one web site profile in her account, her freelancer’s site, www.JerriLedford.com.

If you’ve been given access to profiles in another account, you will have a
second drop-down menu on the far right. As Figure 5-3 shows, this is the menu
that contains the different accounts connected via your Google Analytics
account. For example, the www.JerriLedford.com profile is the default in Jerri’s
account, whereas the SkateFic profile is in Mary’s account. Using the Access
Manager, Mary gave Jerri administrative privileges to the SkateFic profile. Jerri
can see all the metrics and make changes to settings in the SkateFic profile.