Google Analytics is an enterprise-class web analytics solution offered free by Google. Google Analytics generates detailed statistics about the visitors and web traffic generated for a website. Using Google Analytics with your website is a great idea because it takes minutes to sign up for and will provide you all the necessary metrics you’ll need to determine what is working, or not working, on your website for successfully capturing new sales for your business.
Its intuitive user interface provides you easy access to all data, allowing you to quickly obtain the key information you need for your website. Google Analytics keeps track of how all visitors found your website including exact keyword searches from different search engines and which other websites linking to you referred visitors to you. Google Analytics allows you to track the effectiveness of your marketing programs, email marketing, pay per click networks, unpaid organic search, and much more.
Google Analytics is also integrated with Google AdWords. Google Adwords will display an ad for your business on Google search results pages and their advertising network on a pay per click basis; that is, you only pay Google an advertising fee if people click your ads directing them to your website.
Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords optimizes your online marketing campaigns by tracking your sites landing page quality and conversion goals. By using Google Analytics, you can determine which ads are performing well, and which are not, providing the information to minimize or select appropriate keywords for Adwords campaigns.
The following are 10 essential features of Google Analytics:
- Google Analytics allows you to compare data about the performance of your site at two different time periods. It also allows you to chart the data immediately to get a better view of your site. It shows you the performance of your site based on area, city or country metrics.
- Providing referring sites and search results metrics are the basic features of any analytics program, but with Google Analytics you can get statistics not only on the number of visitors a link partner is sending, but the quality of the traffic.
- Once you have your business goals, for example sales & marketing, setup in Google Analytics you are able to determine and thus control vast amounts of data with regard to what’s working and what’s not in your marketing strategy.
- Google Analytics allows complete Adwords integration. This means it provides data on each group, campaign, and keyword. Specifically, you can look at each of these areas and see the number of displays, clicks, your cost, conversion, etc.
- It enables you to customize the rich features provided in your Google Analytics dashboard. You can move the most often used reports to the dashboard for fast access by just clicking the “Add to Dashboard” link.
- The Google Analytics dashboard feature allows you to schedule and automatically send recurring email updates to yourself or other recipients within your business using multiple formats.
- Google Analytics shows you the popularity and effectiveness of each link on every page of your site. These powerful and graphical reports display the effectiveness of your site design in a visual model.
- Google Analytics‘s naviGAtion summary report shows where your users go from the homepage, or how most of them get to your contact page. If people aren’t following your desired naviGAtion, it means you probably need to correct some things on your page to compel users to click on the areas you desire.
- Google Analytics tells you what search keywords people are using to find your site. If certain keywords are proving hot, you might want to consider catering Google Adwords keyword buys, content, and offers to them. It tells you how your customers find you.
- The search engine traffic metric illustrates which search engines are sending the most traffic to your website and how well it’s converting into sales. This will help you optimize your marketing spend and SEO efforts.
In addition to the 10 reasons mentioned above, Google Analytics also has a “Report Finder” to help you search for your archived reports, helps you view your website’s bounce rate over time, shows connection speed data which helps you determine how to prioritize and optimize your site’s design and load time, and much more. To start using Google Analytics navigate to http://www.google.com/analytics/ . You can either register using your existing Google account, for example if you already have a Gmail account, or sign up for a new one. Google Analytics is a feature rich, free application that every website owner should consider integrating into their site.
Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company
Steve Kozyk is the CEO/ Founder of ITegrity, an SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company based in San Diego California. ITegrity focuses on many types of web development & design including health care web site development, corporate web development, small business web development, church web design, and Realtor web site design.