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Finding The Site >

Getting Specific: How many sessions came from people in our geographic area?

1. In the left-hand navigation, Jenny clicks on Audience > Geo > Locations. She sees a report with a map of the world.

2. She clicks on United States and the map shows just the U.S.

There are three levels of detail in this report. Jenny can switch between them in the Primary Dimension selector at the top of the table.

REGION: U.S. states

CITY: Incorporated cities 

METRO: Metropolitan areas that include a collection of incorporated cities and unincorporated communities 

By clicking on a region, Jenny can drill down further into specific incorporated cities. 

Each report has the same columns of metrics as some of the previous reports — the number of sessions, the percentage of sessions from users who were new, the average number of pages viewed and time spent.

NOTE: Most newsrooms should look at traffic by metro and/or state (“region” in Google Analytics) to ensure they’re capturing all of their potential audiences. For example, analyzing only a session from people in the city of Los Angeles would exclude traffic from places such Pasadena, Long Beach and East Los Angeles, an area of Los Angeles County.