Google Analytics Review
When it comes to running a business online, there's nothing quite as good as having the largest search engine in your corner. Google Analytics is a service and series of tools that let you get an up-close look at the people who visit your website, where they're coming from, where they go through your site, and lets you have hard data to make marketing decisions on. It's based on a platform from the company Urchin, which Google bought. You can take the data Google Analytics gathers and put it into context by organizing it into different forms while putting it up against other data to see how it relates. All of this can be done in a point-and-click web-app that acts like a computer desktop. Best of all, it's absolutely free to use. All you need to do is create an account! New web masters may take that for granted, but web analytics software and services are a high-dollar business—especially one with the power Urchin had. Now, giant corporations and mom-and-pop websites have access to some incredible tools.
Keywords are absolutely important when doing regular search engine optimization. When it comes to AdWords, making the right choices will make the difference between wasting your time and money or driving a massive amount of interested traffic to your website. The features are designed with enterprise in mind, so they know that you want to see data in terms of its financial impact. A feature is built into Google Analytics to let you see your AdWords in action. You can see how they're performing over time, see projections of future performance, and make adjustments all in the same place. That means: cost/performance ratios, conversion rates, and much more.
The marketing map feature allows you scan across the globe and see precisely where people are visiting your site from and how many have visited from that location. With that data, you can make better decisions on how to market to the right demographics. Even if you don't make any adjustments, it's still a fun feature that can keep you entertained for a while.
Another tool allows you to create and optimize your landing pages. Web surfers are an impatient bunch who want to see everything they need to know in a couple of pages, and if you can't provide them with that, they'll take off for the website that will. You're always a click away from losing a customer. This area also has funnel information that measures how many people move from the landing page to the second page and all the way down to the end-action you want them to take. That end action could be to click on an advertisement, or it could be to buy a product from your website, or it could just be to fill out a contact form. You can have several funnel graphs which can keep track of the most popular actions on that site.
Google Analytics is like a free web-business suite that collects and chops up information for different people. An administrator can create accounts for other people in the company to see what's going on, but that administrator can also restrict access to certain reports while allowing others to be viewed.
The Executive Overview is a summary of all of the data in the form of four graphic reports on a page. The four reports are:
- Visits and Pageviews (Line-Graph)
- Visits by New Users and Returning Users (Pie Chart)
- Map Overlay of Visitor Locations (Map)
- Visits by Source (Pie Chart)
With those, you can generally see what's going on. After that, you can move to the more in-depth material where the details are.
Several people hated Google Analytics when it first came out. At that time, it was based on another company's software. It was usable, but it required a lot of knowledge regarding what you're doing. Now, as with most Google products, the user interface has been simplified and streamlined so that the everyday web master can take advantage of it without having to take a class. For those who already know what they're doing, it just means that it became much easier and they can do it even faster.
There's more to Google Analytics than just SEO, PPC, and keywords. You can see things like the bounce-rate on pages. Bouncing is when someone visits one of the pages on your site and leaves the site without visiting another page. That could mean a couple of things. The best-case scenario is that you're running a non-profit website dedicated to dispensing useful information, and that page told the visitor everything they wanted to know, so he/she left happy! The more likely scenario is that you're trying to sell something, but the page (or product itself) failed to convert the visitor into a buyer. One of the best ways to use Google Analytics is to take data like this to know what parts of your site you need to work on, whether it's fixing the navigation system or rewriting the copy.
Google Analytics is highly recommended because you have nothing to lose by trying it, and the depth of information it gives you would cost a whole lot of money anywhere else. If you don't have it, sign up for it now.
lot of features
I like Google analytic, it has a lot of features like Advanced visualizations such as Motion Chart,Make Custom Reports, Advanced Segmentation Options etc...
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