What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics, as you probably already know, is one of the many services offered by search engine giant Google. Google Analytics is a free analytics platform* that provides you with detailed statistics about website traffic, sources, and social measurements, and offers you a way to measure goals, conversions, pre-defined trigger events and sales. The point behind Google Analytics (and indeed, behind the tools we review here), is that they can be used by marketing people, as opposed to the more technically minded webmasters and IT people.
* There is a Premium version of Google Analytics available, but, as detailed on their website, you have to reach a pretty significant number of visits to need it.
Google Analytics tracks visitors and provides information about where they came from – search engines, social networks, other websites, direct visits and of course, from ads and campaigns that you create.
So what does Google Analytics give you?
Google Analytics is packed full of features, and they are adding new ones all the time. We’ll give you a brief overview of the things you need to pay most attention to, and some details about some of their newer features.
Traffic Sources
Google Analytics’ ‘Traffic Sources’ provides you with an abundance of information about where your traffic is coming from, and how they found your website. You can see what keywords people used in search engines and found your website, you can see which websites direct traffic your way, and you can see how your Google Ad campaigns are working. This information helps you create the right sort of content for your website (because you know why people have come), understand what sites you need to work with (as they direct good traffic your way), and where your efforts need to be focused (because advertising to people looking for ‘elegant shoes’ is really paying off).
Content
The ‘Content’ section gives you an overview of the popular pages on your website, the bounce rate (people who leave your website right after entering it), and how long people are staying on your site. Of course, you can drill down into specific pages, to see what page people are spending the most time on, and what pages cause people to leave the site. You can see where people go to after visiting the home page, or if they go to the pricing page right after reading about the product – you can learn a lot from your website content data.
This is another excellent source of information where you can learn about what content is interesting to your visitors, what keeps them on the site longer, and if your traction is improving. If your bounce rate consistently drops, and your visitors stay longer and longer on your website, you are probably delivering them the content that they want.
Audience
The ‘Audience’ section shows you information about your visitors. You can see where they from geographically, what language they speak (actually, it’s the language as defined in their browser, but it’s probably close enough), and what device they use to access your website. That’s important, by the way, because you can learn whether you need to address the matter of making your site mobile-friendly, or maybe translate the site into German and French.
You can also see your visitor trend over the past month (by default, but you can change it to whatever range you want), compare it to other metrics (such as bounce rate, or pageviews) and see how many new vs. returning visitors you have.
Real Time
Real Time shows your website activity in, well, real time. You can see what pages your visitors are viewing at the moment, where they came from, and what keywords they may have used to reach your website. You can drill into locations (to see where they are coming from), content (to see the exact page they are on right now), and more. You can use the information to manage events in real time – for example, if you send out a newsletter which links to the website, and you learn that people are clicking the link but leaving the site right after, you can change the page on the fly to something more attractive.
Social Sources
Strictly speaking, this is in the ‘Traffic Sources’ section, however as social networks are a significant part of everyone’s online life, it deserves its own mention. ‘Social’ shows you where your social traffic is coming from – how many from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. In addition, you can see the conversion rate for specific networks (in other words, were those 10,000 new Twitter followers worth it), what’s the actual monetary worth of the social traffic, and social engagement tracking (how many people hit the +1 button on your page, for example).
Pros:
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Free (unless you have LOTS of traffic)
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Includes real-time and social data
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Updated and maintained
Cons:
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No phone support (for the free version)
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Has a steep learning curve
Web Analytics Tools 