By Tzu Ming Chu

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you're more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Google Analytics Tips

1. There’s only a few primary objectives why someone would want to measure their website:

• Understanding who is visiting – geographical locations

• How did they find the site? – referral links

• How long they stayed - average time on site . bounce rates

• When did they come – day, month, week

• What did they do? – site overlay, goals and even tracking

• Did they manage to do what they want? – goals, conversions

• Why did they leave? Surveys or verbal communication, hardly anyone ever tells you why they left. You can only have clues using tools.

2. Google Analytics is the most common tool in the market and it’s free. Only issue is Google owns all the data and some clients are uncomfortable about this.

3. Google Analytics tracks data on a daily basis ( not hourly)

4. As analytics is the hub for any website administrator, the following actionable tools were also developed by google to help customers take action

• Google website optimizer – allows you to test the performance of at least 2 different landing pages through A/B (one page vs another) and multivariate testing (multiple features to test, eg testing of headlines, color schemes etc). The issue with website optimization is you need plenty of traffic to make it statistically significant esp multivariate testing.

• Google Analytics Alerts – helps you set an alert whenever specified key metrics reach a certain threshold.

• Here are headline key metrics you need to know:

i. Bounce rates - % of site visits where the user did not click on any other link. So technically this may or may not mean anything to anyone because it depends on what sort of landing page is being analyzed. E-commerce sites with high bounce rates are worrying, opt-in or email squeeze pages tend to have higher bounce rates (as you would want people to do just one thing at a time). This metric tells you how many people came to your site, puked and left without doing anything else.

ii. Average time on site – average time visitors spend on the entire site, for individual time spent on a page, see average time on page. Essentially this metric tells you engaging your content is.

iii. Unique visits – visits are essentially the closest thing google analytics (or cookie based tools) can do to track ONE PERSON. Naturally, assuming if one person has one pc and one browser, that would constitute ONE person. The world does not work this way of course, so beware! unique visits = website sessions from one unique cookie source.

iv. Unique pageviews – no of pageviews made by one unique visitor/cookie source.

v. Top 10 Referrers – who are your 10 best friends who have been giving traffic to your side. There can be paid (adwords, banners etc) and non paid sources (organic search of referrals from other sites). Currently google analytics enables you to automatically integrate with a google adwords account.

• Analytics for the pages need to be read in line with competitive information such as unique visitors of other sites, how much traffic they are getting from non vs paid traffic.
  
  

Visit google analytic for more info