Google Analytics – What is it?

Importance of Web Analytics is increasing day by day as more websites of the same niche compete for a similar or unique goal. Webmasters now have access to lot of quantitative data that can help them find answers for all “What” on their website. What pages are visited, what products people buy, what browser they use and many more micro details information. There are many web analytics tools available online and Google Analytics is one among the leading Analytics tools we have for years.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool developed and hosted by Google. It helps you create more efficient websites and can increase a Return on Investment for your web marketing campaigns. You can access this tool by going to analytics.google.com. Google Analytics help you understand many interesting facts about your website like how many people visited your website, how long did they stay on any page of your website, which country they came from, which browser they user and many macro detailed information on where your site is at this moment when you read this blog. In the coming posts I will explain you on each matrices we can analyze  and how to make use of it to make your website give the best return on investment. To a basic user this will be a help tutorial to understand different facets of web analytics. There are many Web Analytics tools, however I we be using Google Analytics to help you drill more on analytics. The intention behind this series of post is to help you understand Google Analytics and how to think about web analytics to measure your website performances.

Google Analytics help you provide answers to few mystic questions.

1. How are visitors using my website?

There should be a goal on the existence of your website. Whether it is to sell your product or services, or get more readership to the unique content you publish to monetize. You need to know how visitors of your website use your website, which page they land up, and how long they stay on that particular page, where is he going to from the current page, from which page did he exit and lot more. If you want to find answers to all questions, the only answer is to install a Web Analytics Tools. Here we will be using Google Analytics and I will walk you through that.

2. How can I make my internet marketing campaigns more effective and rewarding?

You own a website and spend a major share of your budget on marketing campaigns. One fine day you see that you are not getting the value for money. What will you do? I will stop spending more money on it and find some other marketing strategies. Yeah .. it was right when web analytics was Greek to me. I will use my web analytics application to see where I am missing my sales on my campaigns. Google Analytics will help you know how effective was your campaign, how many people clicked on your marketing campaign whether it is a banner advertisement or adword campaign. It will show how many clicks you got for a particular channel of marketing and how effective was it comparing to another marketing metrics.

3. How effective is my content?

Content is the real measure of your website success. If you have good content that can hold the attention of the visitors, you will get your visit converted in to leads or sales. Using a web analytics platform you can study how effective is your website content. This can be analyzed by comparing different matrices. We will come in to detailed of it in the coming series.

4. Where and why are my visitors abandoning my shopping cart ?

Consider a scenario where you are getting loads of hits and no sales. There can be lot of factors that we can consider. May be it can be a usability problem on your website or your product is not the best bet on this. Having an analytics platform installed in your website can help you know at what point you missed out the sale. This is done through Funnel Tracking method. You can create a list of steps that you can track against your website. Say for example you sell a product in your website. A visitor need to come to your product page and add it to the shopping basket using your add to cart button. Then he will fill up the order form and move on to the check out. Here he pays the bill and he will get a Thank you page or a confirmation pages saying his order is processed. Each of the aforementioned worth a click through your website checks out process. Using a web analytics application like Google Analytics can help you create a conversion funnel and you can analyze the funnel to see how many milestones did the user crossed, where he end up or abandoned the shopping cart. I will take you through a detailed Funnel Analysis process in the coming modules.

5. How do I improve my website usability?

Web Analytics can help you study the overall website usability and give you more information on how to improvise your website to better conversion.

Going through all the above factors, don’t you feel that you must have a Web Analytics platform which can solve this puzzle? In the coming modules we will go through the step by step process of managing a successful web analytics account.