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How to Use Google Analytics - Web Analytics Advice

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Web analytics

Whether you have a business website or your own personal blog, it is important to know who is visiting your website and what they are doing once they’re there. If you can analyse this information, it can allow you to understand your visitors and in-turn help you target your web content appropriately. A quick, simple way of finding out information about your websites’ visitors is to use Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a tool designed to provide you with in-depth information about the visitors to your site, including; where they are coming from, what they are looking at during their visit and how long they stay.  It also provides detailed geographic information about your visitors as well as a wide variety of other statistics.

Using Google Analytics

To use Google Analytics, you must first set up an account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. After filling in some preliminary information about you and your website, you will be presented with HTML tracking code that must be entered into the existing code of your website. This allows Google to track information about the people visiting your site. If you need help with where to put this code, Google provide a number of frequently asked questions and support that should help. Once you have inserted the code, you can return to the Google Analytics website to check that it has been properly setup.

Once setup, the code will start collecting visitor information. You can begin analysing the collected information only after the first 24 hour period, as statistics are collated on a daily basis. Once you have signed into Google Analytics you will be presented with a page asking you to choose which website you would like to view statistics from. If you have only setup one website with a tracking code, you will only have one option. Once you select the relevant website, you will be sent to the Dashboard page. This provides some quick, at-a-glance statistics that most people will want to see including the number of unique visitors, number of page views, average time on site and pages per visit. A menu provides access to in depth information for a variety of areas these are:

Intelligence

This area allows users to setup custom alerts for your site. These alerts can be on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and can be setup for a wide variety of statistics. For example, you could setup an alert for a specific amount of visitors in one day. When this number is reached, Google records the alert and lets you know. This can be particularly useful to find out what trends are bringing visitors to your website.

Visitors

This area provides you with in-depth detailed information about the visitors to your site including geographic information, new vs returning visitors, the languages they speak, internet browsers they use, the speed of their connections and a number of visitor trending tools. These statistics can be displayed in a variety of ways, including map overlays, timeline graphs, pie charts and simple figures.

Traffic Sources

This area provides information about where your visitors are coming from. This can be particularly useful to find out if your marketing is working and where your efforts are best placed. It also provides information on search engine keywords that people search for before visiting your site, again helping you understand what people are looking for when visiting your site.

Content

This areas provides in depth analysis of the content that your visitors are looking at. It allows you to see how far people are “drilling down” into your site and can help you understand whether people are enjoying the journey your site provides. It also allows you to see what pages visitors are looking at which can help you in deciding what content to provide and how best to display it. It also gives you information on what pages people are looking at before they leave your site, again helping you decide what content is engaging your audience.

Goals

This area allows you to setup specific goals for your site. This might be anything from visitors landing on a specific page or downloading a specific file, to buying items through your ecommerce system.

Guides and further information

Each area of the site has guides that will help you understand the information that is presented to you. There are also a number of guides to help you make sure you get the most you can from the Analytics tool.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you streamline and improve your website. By understanding your visitors and the way they interact with your site, you can modify and adjust it to improve visitor retention.

For more information, or to start using Google Analytics, visit www.google.com/analytics

This business information might also be of interest: Search engines

Measure your online success

Just about everybody talks about social media and going online these days. A lot of companies spend a lot of time and therefore money on it – but do you know whether it’s actually paying off, or how to evaluate your success?

You might have seen a lot of online tools that measure your influence in terms of social networking. They take a look at how often you post a message, how many people reply and retweet it, and they work out a score.  The way they work is relatively straightforward. They look at your public Tweets, see how many people are following you and how many people you are following in return, how often people disseminate your messages, how often you reply to people and what sort of subjects you mention. They then award you an overall score.

If you’re on social networks for the sake of being social it might have some sort of value as a vanity exercise (and these things are certainly fun) but unless you’re able to track who you’re influencing and to do what (like “use your goods or services”) it’s not going to do much for you in terms of knowing the effect your online presence is having.

Measuring your Social media impact

If there is one myth in social media that can be exploded usefully then it’s “the amount of followers on Twitter or Facebook Friends you have actually matters.” It does, up to a point. If nobody is paying attention there is obviously no point in saying anything. This is where looking at a free service like as previously discussed can help. The overall score doesn’t matter but it will tell you how many “effective” followers you have. In other words how many people appear to be reading your updates and statuses, rather than how many people signed up once and went away.

The number may not be as high as you’d hoped.  Many fewer people will take an active interest in your social media streams than signed up for them – there isn’t time.  Tools such as the ones already mentioned will also identify the people who act upon your social networking most – have a look at these. Are they the sort of people you want to influence? Could you be putting more targeted updates out there?

Measuring online Reach and reputation

This is the difference between sheer numbers and actual reach. It’s possible to look over these figures, how often you’re being retweeted, and making a good educated guess – at no charge – as to what this social media is doing to your reputation.

It is vital not to overlook the full extent of your reach, and this should include more than your social media impact. Use an analytics tool on your website to check where the incoming links are from, and equally importantly where the readers are going next. Have a look into any mentions of your business on the social networks – this is easy by downloading a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn monitoring program like Tweetdeck and having a constant search for your brand. Remember also that Google Alerts is free and will offer a daily summary of anywhere you’ve been mentioned.

Remember everything that’s seen in public will influence your brand’s reputation. Bear this in mind and you should be OK.

SEO

One of the best ways to see how you’re doing is to look at where you are in the search engine optimisation (SEO) rankings – type whatever search term you wish into Google and see where you come up. Be careful with the search term you’re using to test: many people start by searching for their own company name but if a customer knows your business’ name they’ve already found you! So rather than seeing where you come as “Fred’s Garden Paradise, Ealing” try searching for “Garden centre, Ealing” as that’s what the new customer will be doing.

If you’re coming up reasonably low or not at all, try reading our article on SEO and see whether you can improve your ranking.

Web analytics

Briefly you can put a little code into your website which will then tell you where people are coming from, what they were doing before they came to your website and what they do afterwards. This will tell you where your influence is working best.

It will also tell you how many people in total are visiting your site which, combined with your total ecommerce sales, will tell you what percentage are buying when they arrive.

Visit our page on web analytics to read more.

Action points:

  • Look at systems that measure your social influence, not for total numbers but for the sort of people who are watching your social media feeds. If they aren’t the sort who will buy from you consider adjusting your social media messaging.
  • Check all of your messages for spelling and grammar.
  • Check your SEO rankings – are you coming high enough up the Google rankings? If not, have a look at our SEO advice.
  • Install an inexpensive (or free) web analytics package on your website and find out about your visitors’ behaviour.
This business information might also be of interest: Business website, Internet marketing, Social networking

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