What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics allows you to track visitors to your site and their behavior. It shows you where they came from, what keywords they used to find you, where they went on your site and how long they spent there. You can use this data to help shape your marketing strategy: If a lot of your traffic is coming from a particular source without any effort on your behalf, what would happen to the number of visitors if you focussed on that area a little? Are you targeting the right keywords? Should you put more effort into optimizing images, videos or social media?
The analytics package is one of Google’s most popular and well used tools and as such is constantly being updated and upgraded to keep it leading the pack. Nevertheless, there are competitors lurking who you may want to investigate as well although many of these require a small monthly payment.
Benefits
Google Analytics is a free service and offers many of the same services, and many more in some cases, than its paid competitors. Feel free to drop in and out of your account to check on figures or set up weekly e-mail reports to have information sent straight to your inbox.
You are given information on almost every aspect of user behavior. If your site isn’t converting well, you can find out where people are leaving your site so you know the best pages to make tweaks to. If any of your pages have high bounce rates, you can be pretty sure there’s something not quite right on there.
Geographical data can lead to new business opportunities. Plenty of visits from Lithuania but you don’t offer postage to eastern Europe? More traffic from Darwin than Sydney but you don’t have a store in NT?
Working hand in hand with AdWords, you can see exactly how effective your advertising is and when your wording is at its best or worst. You can also check how your SEO changes are working out by comparing time frames to see the difference before and after a tweak.
You can see how many times people land on your 404 page and how these people are getting to that page. If it’s from internal links you’ll want to get that fixed straight away, if it’s from external sources you’ll want to
Drawbacks/Alternatives
Some people oppose Google’s stance on collecting data from your site. Alternatives, such as Piwik, have sprung up as a result and many praise the speed of this open source analytics package.
Google Analytics focuses purely on your main site and your traffic. Search engine marketing now encompasses so much more than this but your social media offerings are not covered by this service. Clicky offers details on your Twitter page and followers, but is only free to sites with fewer than 3000 page views.
GA groups all your traffic sources together, so if you want to differentiate between image searches and regular searches you have to set up filters to make this happen. With Mint these differences are separated naturally and the site also gives you handy feed subscription details, although the is a license fee for use.
Although quick, Google doesn’t provide details of users in absolute real time. Reinvigorate lets you watch users land on your site and you can then follow their progress to see where they go, what they click on and if they buy anything as it happens. Add to that a funky heat-mapping technology and you’ve got yourself an impressive package. Monthly fees apply.
Chart Beat, another paid for site, shows information in two main sections – real time and historical data. Useful tools such as scroll mapping (which shows how much of each page a user scrolled down, where they paused etc), page density and Twitter stats coupled with fancy graphics and charts make this a valuable tool.
Tools
EpikOne allows you to make notes within the analytics package, which is useful if more than one user has access to the account. Leave details of programmes you’re running, anything you’re testing or monitoring and details or new priorities or goals.
LunaMetrics is a Firefox plug-in that copies goals from one profile to another. There’s also a Firefox add-on that allows you to draw information straight to Google Docs, rather than having to download.
VKI Studios has created a script that lets you keep up with how many people are using the social media buttons on your articles – how many likes, stumbles, diggs etc.