SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

Google Analytics: What Is It And How Can I Use It?

Posted by Bryan at April 15th, 2008

One of the most useful tools that any webmaster can have installed on their site is Google Analytics. Having the power to either personally view, or invite others to view statistics for your site such as the number of visitors to your site, what keywords users are finding your site through, how long they spent on your site, and plenty more. Just like when Google had said “enough” to paying for 411 information, thus releasing 1-800-GOOG-411 for free, this is a fully functional web analytics software that they offer for free as well.

To set up your Google Analytics account, simply register for any or all of your personal websites and then add the html code assigned to each site. After Google Analytics has a chance to gather the information on your site (I recommend giving it at least a day or two before you start following the information), you’ll be given several different options on how you can view the information that it collects.

The Visitors tab shows you everything you could want to know about who visits your site, down to the country and browser that they’re using.

The Traffic Sources tab shows you what sites referred your visitors over and keywords used to find your site, as well as what percentage of your total traffic came directly to your site, was referred to your site, or came from a search engine. This tab also includes your Google AdWords campaign and regular campaign controls, which allow you to monitor the results of specific actions that you’ve done to increase traffic.

The Content Tab gives you statistical information on the pageviews, unique views and bounce rate. It’s very useful to find out which pages people are entering through the most, leaving from, and what ones are viewed the most.

It also has it’s own Goals tab which you can manually configure if you have a specific goal you would like to achieve traffic wise. It provides you with enough information to let you know how close to succeeding you are and how long you have left and what’s working the best to achieve those goals.

There’s really no excuse not to have Google Analytics set up on your site, considering how useful it is and that it’s free. The ability to add another Gmail account on to view your statistics works great too if you need advice or want to hire on an SEO/SEM.

FYI, if your site exceeds 5 Million page views for month, unless you’re a Google AdWords member as well, you won’t see anymore information than the initial 5 Million. Hopefully that won’t inconvenience you too much.

Below you’ll find a screen shot from the Google Analytics page for LeopardDocks.com - Submit, Download, and Search Custom Leopard Docks. Click the thumbnail to see it full sized.