Digging Deeper into Google Analytics - So what is Web Analytics Anyway?
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Web analytics measures and analyzes the traffic a website receives. It can help a company determine whether the money it is spending on advertising really is well spent, or should be redirected. It can answer such questions as: are we using the right keywords? How can we improve our website design? Is our email newsletter helping to draw in visitors? How do visitors come to our website, and from where (both in terms of online location and geographical location)?
Google Analytics tracks this information for you. You sign up for the service, which is integrated with Google AdWords. You do need a Google account of some kind to use the service (such as Gmail), but it doesn’t need to be AdWords. You paste a bit of Google-provided JavaScript tracking code into each of the pages of your website that you want tracked, and you’re ready to go.
So what does Google track? Well, it can track your keywords – all of them, from every search engine you have a campaign with, not just Google. That’s not all. The company says it can track “All of your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links, search engines, and keywords.” That’s a lot of information.
Fortunately, Google organizes it visually in ways that make it easy to digest. Pie charts and Flash files help. It’s not just a snapshot taken out of context, either. For example, say you have an e-commerce website and you want to know not only how many visitors are buying the product you’re currently promoting, but is the spike really due to the promotion? You can set up a “goal” with Google Analytics. That is, you give it a chain of URLs (pages you expect a visitor to visit in order), and Google will track users that follow that chain.
A related item that Google Analytics helps with is funnel visualization. This is what happens when visitors go through your website, apparently eager to buy something, but then abruptly bail out. Google Analytics has a feature that specifically addresses this. It “shows you the bottlenecks in your conversion and checkout processes – attributable to such factors as confusing content or maze-like navigation – so you can eliminate or work around them,” according to one of the Google Analytics information pages.
The service also gives you information about referrers, those sites that link to yours, so you can see where your visitors are coming from. But that’s not all you can find out about your visitors, of course. If they have not turned off JavaScript, you can find out what browsers they use, as well as their screen resolutions, so you can design your web pages accordingly. For example, if you find that 38 percent of your visitors use Firefox, you can tell your web designers they’d better stop assuming that the only thing that matters is the way the site looks in Internet Explorer. Likewise, you can find out the screen resolutions that visitors use.
You can find out where in the world your visitors are coming from, which Google shows you on a nice map. If you’re interested in what companies visitors come from, Google can give you that information as well, to a more limited degree. It isn’t perfect; it may only show the user’s ISP, for example. You can even get a “top ten” list of various things, such as which companies visit your site most (of those who actually report a company, remember).
Once you have gathered analytics information for a while, you can start doing useful comparisons. For example, is the number of visitors to your site this Friday up or down from last Friday? Or from this time last month, or last year? Trying to analyze this kind of information has sometimes been known as “data mining,” and it has been around for years. Back then it was something performed with records kept in a company’s huge data warehouses; now it is available online, thanks to Google.
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