Learn How To Make Use of Google Analytics
A Free Tool That Helps Improve Your Website
Get the Most out of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is not only the most popular analytics program on the internet, it is also free. Based around the Urchin analytic tool (which Google purchased) it offers a high degree of functionality because installation usually involves adding code to your website footer, and a good webmaster can figure out how to do this for your whole site in about 3 minutes.
Things you can do with Google Analytics:
measure growth – Anyone with an SEO campaign, or any in-house campaign manager, should set up Analytics for this purpose as quickly possible. In lots of cases SEO programs will bring traffic for a wide variety of keywords, so the ability to show traffic growth will be very important, especially if your chosen short-tail keywords are expected to take longer to move up in the rankings. You can also demonstrate the value of short-tail traffic as it comes into play and your growth rate doubles or triples until it reaches a saturation point.
Identify sources of click fraud. If you’re running a content match pay-per-click campaign (and you may be without even knowing it) you can look at your list of referring sites filtered by bounce rate. Sites that bring a very high bounce rate with a limited amount of time on the site should be excluded from content match channels.
See where website traffic is coming from. Analytics tools have had this feature from the beginning, but you can gain some clear advantages when you find out what your traffic sources are. For instance, if you’re buying paid ads on a certain site, you can see how many of them actually click through to you, how long they stay on your site, and if they take any actions while they
see which SEO keywords convert
Watch bounce rate
See which pages are most popular Top Landing Pages
See which pages have highest abandonment rate Top Exit Pages - funnels
Compare against benchmarked sites
Understand seasonality
Learn Browser Audience, Discover average connection speed (bounce rate by speed), screen size, Flash Version
New vs. Returning
The site overlay (where people click!)
create recurring reports
Filter page – how to see results on specific pages
How to put Google Analytics code on every page of your website:
If you have a universal footer that gets called through include files, a template, or CSS, then just put the code in the footer.
If you have an HTML site, and use a WYSIWYG program, you can do a global “find and replace” where you find every page with a closing Body tag, and replace it with the code plus the body tag.
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Notes and Special Information
Special note: There are other analytics programs like Omniture and Clicktracks, which provide more in-depth data, but Google Analytics is a free tool that works with small and large companies.