Google Analytics: It’s Free, It’s Insightful

Beginner Level

Let me ask you this: Are you collecting important data from your website that will help you determine your online strategy moving forward? If not, let us introduce you to Google Analytics – a free service provided by Google to help you collect important usage information about your website.

Many of us underestimate the power of collecting data on our websites, and analyzing it regularly. This is one of the most crucial mistakes you can make. After all, how you can you make logical decisions about your online strategy if you do not even know how much traffic your website gets now? More importantly, how can you gauge if your strategies are working if you do not have monthly comparison data?

There are many tools out there which can help you collect analytical data on your site. WebTrends is one of them but you will pay for your software. Google Analytics is FREE and easy to deploy. And free is good, right? Besides, the data it collects is excellent, and reports are easy to run & understand. Of course, you may need to hire an Internet Marketing Agency to generate your reports, interpret them and help you layout your future strategy, if you do not have the in-house staff to accomplish it.

So how does it work and what types of data will it collect? We have provided a brief overview of just some of the data you can collect below.

Basic Statistics

• Visits/Visitors: You will know how many visitors, as well as new and repeat visits, you have had to your site within a defined time period.
  
  
• Bounce Rate: These are users who came to a page on your site and then immediately left. You want this number to be as low as possible. If this number is high you need to reassess the aesthetics, usability and calls to action on your site.
  
  
• Page Views: Tells you how many pages were viewed on your site during the defined time period.
  
  
• Time Spent On Site: Tells you how much time the average user spent browsing your site. The longer the better.
  
  
• Most Popular Pages: See which pages on your site were most popular with users, had the highest bounce rate or were used as entrance and exit pages more frequently.
  
  
• Geographic data: Know the exact state, country and/or region of where your visitors are coming from. Use this information to better target your online and offline marketing strategies.
  
  
• Keywords: What keywords are driving traffic to your site? These can come from organic or paid listings on a variety of search engines.
  
  

Traffic Sources

• Organic Traffic: If you are deploying SEO techniques on your site, you should probably be able to tell how well they are working. Analytics will show you comparison data for defined time periods of exactly how much traffic was sent to your site from organic listings on engines.
  
  
• Referral Site: If you have your URL posted to online directories, shopping engines, etc., you will be able to see what percentage of your traffic is coming from these referring websites.
  
  
• Direct Traffic: The percentage of visitors who have typed in your URL and went directly to your site.

eCommerce Information
For those of you who sell products online, this could be the most important data you can collect. In a nutshell, by deploying the Google Analytics eCommerce code to you website, you will be able to tell the exact order value generated from organic listings, paid ads, and other traffic sources for your site. This will help you continue strategies that are working and refine those that are not. The code is a little more tricky to deploy, but well worth it!

AdWords Integration
This is helpful for those of you who run paid advertising programs on Google, or AdWords. This is Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model and you can tie both sets of data together to gain a more comprehensive picture of your website and online marketing efforts. It will help you identify which landing pages are converting, and those that are not. It will also help you correlate search rank with revenue and conversions for each keyword you buy.

How Does It Work?
It’s simple. Create an Analytics account; create a new profile for your website and Google will generate a snippet of java script code to post on your site. The catch is that this code has to be on every single page of your site. Normally, this can easily be done by your developers, but is dependent upon how your site is structured.So, there you have it. A free tool that will allow you to actually make logical decisions based on sound data. What could possibly better?

For more information on Google Analytics, visit google.com/analytics.

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