Google Analytics is THE most powerful analytical tool bar none for any business looking to find out information on visitors coming to their site. It is not difficult to implement and is easy to use.
What is it?
Google Analytics allows website owners to access data related to people who visit their site via the Google search engine and provides data on how these visitors subsequently interact with the site. This facility is made possible by virtue of a piece of JavaScript code which is embedded into the HTML enabling Google to track visitor behaviour. Setting up an account with GA allows this unique tracking code to be generated.
With platforms such as WordPress it is not necessary to have any coding knowledge to set up the tracking. It can be done via one of many SEO plug-ins and then just pasting in the extracted ID reference from the full Javascript code (as per example shown below)
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i[‘GoogleAnalyticsObject’]=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,’script’,’//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js’,’ga’);
ga(‘create’, ‘UA-24118409-6′, ‘paulcompelli.com’);
ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
</script>
Why sort of data is available?
When you start to look at the information GA provides, the power of this tool quickly becomes apparent. For example it will show:
- The number of visitors
- New versus returning visitors
- Page Popularity
- What devices were used to access the site
- What geographical area the site was accessed from
- Real time statistics
- How visitors navigate through the site
- Where they enter and exit.
- Comparative data over different time periods.
All this information can be reviewed and assessed to identify performing and non-performing areas and provide opportunities for improvement.
In addition there are other features that can be developed such as setting up Goals, ecommerce tracking, connecting to an Adwords Account and Google Webmaster Accounts.
Summary
Google Analytics is continually evolving to become more and more powerful. Already it can be used to track interaction with web applications very easily and with the latest launch of Universal Analytics it is possible to download non-web data for analysis making it even more powerful.
There is no doubt that businesses who actively review their visitor behaviour at this level have much more useful information at their disposal as a basis for making future business decisions.
And it’s free!
