Ask the Right Questions and Get The Most From Google Analytics
December 30, 2009 by
Adam
Filed under
Blogging, Website Traffic, Websites
Google Analytics is arguably one of the company’s most beneficial tools (and they have many) for Internet marketers. Yet the majority of users hardly scratch the surface when it comes to exploring the true functionality of the tool. It seems that many are just put off by its apparent complexity. This is a great shame as you do not need to be a logistician, data technician or a Google insider to reap great benefits from the information contained therein.
Google Analytics can seem to be quite daunting at first glance, but if you spend an hour or so just surfing around within the site it will start to make sense. Google makes it relatively easy to implement the necessary tracking code on your site and they have a number of question and answer resources available to help you ensure that it is all set up correctly. If you have a number of different sites, it is worth taking time to ensure that you set up your accounts well in the first instance, as this will certainly help you navigate down the road.
Many people seem to struggle to come to terms with what Google Analytics is really trying to tell them. You can get as much information out of this program as you could ever want, but don’t burden yourself with trying to analyze every conceivable area. Rather, focus on what is really important to you.
You can set up a number of goals and events, enabling you to follow what happens according to triggers that you set up on your website or elsewhere. If you have an ad campaign or article marketing campaign you will hopefully have distinct landing pages within your site, enabling you to categorize visitor arrival points. You need to be able to see what happens when visitors arrive at those pages, where they went from there or whether they moved through your shopping cart to your payment pages, for example. If you notice that they do not go anywhere else once they arrive at your landing page, but just leave, a phenomenon also known as a high bounce rate, then you need to consider whether the content of your landing page is truly appropriate to the trigger that sent them there in the first place.
The program will allow you to break down your visitors according to their geographic source, of great interest to you if you are geo-targeting your campaigns. You can see which keywords are being used most by visitors who arrive at your site, enabling you to create marketing campaigns accordingly.
Google Analytics should be your friend and not something to be scared of. You owe it to yourself to educate and use this remarkable and free intelligence to your benefit.
How do you get the most from Google Analytics?
Adam Toren
Google analyticals is a great tool. and free,,lol Just takes a lil seting up and tweaking to get the info you want out of it.
Nice post
Great summary, Adam. Something we’ve just recently started using is Get Clicky. Its pretty sweet! (We still use Google Analytics though, too)
I love google analytics. Great product and it is very easy to customize. I like doing comparisons by date and even by time of day.
Google Analytics give maximum results, if combines with Google adsnese. For example, it will show you which post are being read by visitors most of the time. We can take some extra time to monetize that post for maximum results or post an affiliation banner related to that post.
Analytics is a great tool - like you say it offers so much to the web site owner. The key is knowing how to use it to your benefit. It’s a great way to see if you are actually getting visitors from your targeted keywords, therefore giving you the insight to tweak your content, etc. I especially like the ability to see how long people stay on my site - allows me to determine if I need to add more interest.
Great summary, Adam. Something we’ve just recently started using is Get Clicky. Its pretty sweet! Analytics is a great tool. i like you say it offers so much to the web site owner.
Analytics is a great tool that provides the most complete information about your site, the main task to correctly use this information to your advantage…
Very useful article. I want to use on my blog. When I use it I can give you backlink. Thank you admin.
I agree that Google Analytics is one of the best tools that Google has provided, It is better than many paid website analytic programs. It is quite important to analyze the data that Google Analytics provides. You can learn a lot about your site and how people interact with it. Knowing this allows you to tweak your site to convert customers better and provide a better user experience.
You know I definitely love some of the new features they added awhile ago to Google Analytics that really made it even more powerful and useful to me. And the best part has always been that it is is free for all of us to use, so we really do need to take full advantage of it.
Till then,
Jean
Great tool, but even greater tool if you have loads and loads of entries to your site!
Google analytics is really a useful instrument and what is more, it is free!
The difficult thing is being able to understand and “interpret” the data correctly and especially be able to take actions to improve the performance of your site
Every program, application and tool that can be used to gain more traffic is good in my opinion. But like in real world to use a tool we need to have some skills to use it properly, or we can harm ourselves.
I am addicted to Google Analytics. I check it daily. I love the feature that shows the percentage of users that have not visited your site before.
Google Analytics is like worse than my crackberry. lol I pour over that thing everyday I can’t get over the detail of the data that it shows you. I was able to pinpoint a friend 10 miles away scouring my site every day. Asked him about his surfing on my site and he was BLOWN Away. It is nice to watch “AS” big brother for once.
Good article
Kevin Latmore
It is a great stuff to use. Google analytics is very useful. It can be made still more useful if I can immediate analysis on the users.
Every program, application and tool that can be used to gain more traffic is good in my opinion. But like in real world to use a tool we need to have some skills to use it properly, or we can harm ourselves.
It truly is rather important to analyze the data that Google Analytics provides. One can learn a lot about your web site and how people interact with it.
I rely little on google analytics.Most of the time i prefer using awstats because i have to reinstall the code every time i change the theme.So i prefer awstats.