Series 4, Article 29
“Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back.” Paul Koks, Online Metrics
It generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources, and measures conversions and sales. It’s the most widely used website statistics service. The basic service is free of charge and a premium version is available for a fee.
Knowing your audience and what they want is an important success factor for any website. The best way to know your audience is through your traffic stats and this is exactly what Google Analytics provide for FREE. Google Analytics is a must have for every website or blog.
It shows you who visits your website – user’s geographical location, which browser did they use, what is their screen resolution, which language they speak, etc.
You can see what people do when they are on your website — how long they stay on your website, what pages they are visiting the most, which page is causing the users to leave most often, how many pages users are viewing, etc.
You can see when they visit your site — which time of the day is the hottest for your website. This helps you pick the time to publish your posts.
How are they finding your website — whether it was through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc), social networks (facebook, twitter etc), a link from another website, or a direct type-in. Google Analytics also shows you the breakdown of each traffic source, so you can focus on specific ones if you like.
How users interact with your site’s content – You can see how many users clicked on a specific link.
We use all the data to improve our site and give our audience what they like.