Google Stats Analytics - Awesome Power & It's Free!

by David Howlett

I happened by chance to install Google Analytics before the enormous demand forced Google to limit subscriptions.

It's been running now for about a week and I've got to say I'm impressed. You effectively get a high-end web stats analysis package that would normally cost a considerable amount of money, for absolutely nothing.

Of course there is a price to pay in another way relating to the information Google will be collecting as they analyse people's behaviour on the many thousands of websites that will have it installed. There could be privacy issues and this is something to be addressed by the wider web community.

To get started you complete the account information and then enter a simple snippet of code onto every page you want to monitor. I did this using the Dreamweaver master template of my site and so had the code on every page in no time.

For the first couple of days nothing seemed to happen then the graphs and coloured pie charts started to come to life as it picked up the visitors on the site.

The first page you see is the Executive Overview. This has four charts giving a basic outline of what's going on with the site. There is Visits and Pageviews, Visits by New and Returning, Visits by Source and interestingly a Geo Map Overlay. This has little dots on it showing each of the main point in the world where the visitors are coming from. I was surprised to learn I am getting 3.3 per cent of my visitors from the Philippines for instance.

Basically the stats are spilt into three topic areas namely: Executive, Marketer and Webmaster. The Webmaster section could be likened to conventional stats. It's got all the usual things such as browser versions, screen resolutions and so on. And it all seems very easy to understand with nice colour charts for everything. Also some of the information is really useful as well, such as most screen resolutions are now 1024 x 768 and I would never have thought that 69 per cent of my visitors are using broadband connections.

But it's the Marketer area where things are really happening. Google have gone to town on this one and they really want people to understand just what keywords are converting visitors into action.

Take the 'Overall Keyword Conversion'. This actually shows which keywords and keyword phrases are driving quality traffic. The system does this by analysing what each visits does from the keyword they put in and so the more activity the more value.

The other big thing Google has done is integrate the Adwords results right into the stats. You can do direct comparisons between your organic search terms and your PPC terms. And not only Adwords it can be set-up to analyse other PPC outputs as well.

But if all this is not enough for you it's got some really advanced features you can set-up for yourself as well.

One of these is Campaign Conversion. With this you can set up referral link and then monitor the performance of the sources such as a newsletter or your PPC campaigns.

The other really powerful feature is to set-up goals for the visitors. This means you can identify some set pages people go through for a particular process. A good example would be a shopping cart checkout.

All you do is enter each page as points towards the goal and then as the visitors go through the process you will start to see the pages where visitors are dropping off and be so be able to do something about it.

So Google Analytics seems to have great potential. It is no great surprise that demand has so quickly outstripped supply. But what's really powerful about it is that it makes web stats interesting. At long last here is a package that's really affordable and enables any website owner to really start to understand exactly what is going on with the visitors on their site and so make effective changes to improve every aspect about it.

Our credits to the source/author of this article: Author: David Howlett David Howlett helps website owners and managers to take charge of the marketing on their sites. Visit his website at: www.davidhowlett.co.uk This article is taken from the Goarticles website.

Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=93911