by John Eberhard
Google Analytics is a free web statistics service offered by Google. Just sign up with an account or you can do it easily from your existing Google AdWords or Gmail account. Then you get some HTML code that needs to be put on every single page of your website. If you have multiple websites, create a profile for each site.
OK, now you’ve got Google Analytics set up. What kind of information does it tell you?
The first thing it tells you is how many visitors you are getting to the site each week. I graph this for my own site. For many of our clients we do a monthly report that shows how many visitors they got to their site for the last month.
If you are doing any kind of website marketing program, this number of website visitors should be going up month to month. That tells you that your program is working.
Some people insist that the real statistic you want to look at is not web visitors, but unique visitors, which counts a person only once even if he came to your site multiple times. I disagree with this, because ideally you want people to come to your site multiple times, don’t you?
The next thing to look at is Page Views. This is the total number of pages that were viewed in the given time frame that you’re looking at. This will always be at least as many as the web visitors, but will almost always be more. You want this to be as much higher than the web visits as possible, because it shows that people are moving through your site to multiple pages. You want your ratio of page views to visits to be as high as possible, because the more pages they look at, the better your chances are to sell them your product or service. It also means they are not bailing after just one page.
The next thing to look at is the top pages and how many visits they are getting in your given time frame. This shows you what your most popular pages are, it shows you how effective your navigation system is in getting people to the pages that are most important for you, and you can see how much traffic any new or special pages are getting. You can also create special landing pages for an email or pay per click campaign and this shows how many people actually arrived there. You can also look at specific form pages or buy pages on your site and see how many people went there versus how many people filled out the form or bought the item. If the ratio of visitors to conversions for those pages is poor, that tells you that you need to work on improving those pages.
The next thing to look at is the referring websites. These are sites that have a link to your site, and it shows what the site is and how many people came to your site from there. The biggest numbers here are usually from search engines, but you will also see some other sites that have links to yours. This tells you which of your link building or social media marketing actions are bringing people to your site.
For instance, you might see referrals from Facebook or Twitter. Or you might find out Wikipedia or some similar site has a link to you. For instance, on my political site I have written several articles about a historian named Alexander Tytler and his cycle of democracy, and Wikipedia has linked to my articles and I get a lot of traffic from that.
The next thing to look at are the keywords that people entered in search engines on their way to arriving at your site. This gives you an indication of what keywords are important for you, and can be an indication of which keywords your site is ranking well for. It also shows which keywords people are entering to arrive at your site via the pay per click systems like Google AdWords.
Having Google Analytics on your site, you can really tell what is going on with your visitors, and you can see how well each new thing you do is working. Anyone who has a website who is serious about getting good results from that website should put Google Analytics or some other type of web statistics system up on that site. I like Analytics because it is free and has some great features. Without it, you are flying blind. With it, you can make more intelligent decisions and improve your results.
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