The Value of Google Analytics

Don’t you wish that there were some way that you could track your advertisements, and find out where they go, who saw them, and whether they actually read them, or simply balled them up and threw them away?

If you’re involved in online business and marketing, you can.

There are plenty of tracking services out there, but one of the very best site traffic tracking services has to be Google Analytics. The best part is that it’s free! It’s a service that Google, the world’s largest search engine, provides to all webmasters and site owners, and it’s easy to sign up and get started.

Getting Google Analytics is simply a matter of signing up as a webmaster, and verifying that you own your site, by placing a metatag or a piece of code on your site. If that sounds like Greek to you, don’t worry – any good web designer can do it for you, in seconds.

Once you’re verified as the owner of your particular site, you can access the Google Analytics platform, and take a look at your site’s statistics, in a real time environment. The platform tells you things like who has visited your site, from which country they are, how long they spent on your site, and which pages they visited. It also tells you how many visitors ‘bounced’, or left your site immediately, and which of your exte
al links are bringing you the most traffic.

In short, Google Analytics gives a real snapshot of what’s been going on on your site at any given moment.

That all sounds great, and pretty high tech, doesn’t it? But you’re probably still wondering how Google Analytics can help your business and website to perform better. After all, it’s all very well knowing what your traffic stats are, but what do you do with that information.

Let’s consider geography first. Let’s assume that you have a small business in New York City, for argument sake. You log into Google Analytics, and discover that only a small fraction of your traffic even comes from the United States, and that most of your visitors are from other parts of the world! Because you have a local business, rather than a global one, you now know that you need to focus more on local search engine optimisation, perhaps by including the terms ‘New York’, and ‘NYC’ in your keywords. Logging in just once would have helped you to focus your marketing efforts on the people who are likely to become your clients, and would probably have saved you time and money.

Perhaps you do have an international business though. Google Analytics is a powerful tool there too.

While you won’t be too conce
ed about where your traffic comes from in terms of geography, you will still care about where they’re coming from on the internet, and which pages generate the most interest. By using the tools that allow you to see the links that bring traffic to your page, you can determine which of your online advertising platforms are succeeding, and which need work. You can find out which article directories bring you the most traffic from your article marketing, and whether your facebook page is really working. You can also see how long those people spent on your site, and whether or not your content is doing its job, of engaging your visitors, and keeping them interested.

On the other hand, if you find that you have a high bounce rate, where visitors click through to your site, and then leave again, you know that there must be a problem. You can check things like how long your site takes to load, or whether there are any design or functionality flaws.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of what Google Analytics can tell you about your website, and its performance, and it really is a powerful tool that every business and website owner should be using. Just building a website blindly, and trusting that you will get the traffic you need to boost sales, isn’t enough, and why should you ‘fly blind’ if you have access to all this information!

The truth is, learning to understand and interpret the statistics and figures that Google Analytics gives you can be a bit of a steep learning curve, but it’s well worth the effort. It truly does allow you to measure and track your site’s progress, and can help you to identify problems, and correct them, quickly and easily. It can even help you to fine-tune your online marketing plan.

So if you’re serious about business, and your website, there is simply no question. You should be using Google Analytics.