Google Analytics 5 Minute Overview

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization | Posted on: June 29th 2010 | By: Mark Mitchell

A Look At Google Analytics In 5 Minutes

There was a time not so long ago that a good “web stats” software package would cost tens of thousands of dollars and require a very steep monthly subscription. Today fortunately for us Google offers Google Analytics for free.

In 2005 Google bought Urchin Software Corporation's analytics system, Urchin on Demand and used this as the basis for the product they offer today. All you need to get going is a Google account and a website (you must have access to edit the HTML code).

Once signed in to Google Analytics you are given a small snippet of code that you paste onto every page that you would like track. This Javascript code is usually inserted just before the closing tag. We usually put this code in the template of the content management system so that it is automatically on every page.

There are many great insights Analytics can offer not only your website, but your entire business. I often tell clients:

“Think about the power of this tool, the information it gives you can be applied to your entire business not just your website.” For example, let’s say you are a local clothing boutique, and you are considering opening a second location. Your intuition tells you that a certain part of town seems like a good location but you are not completely sure. Google Analytics can tell you where you website visitors are coming from down to the zip code. You can use this information to decide exactly where the right location might be.

Some of the basic things Google Analytics tells you:

• How many visitors to your website
• How long the visitor stayed on the site
• What the visitor looked at on the site
• Where the visitor is located down to the zip code
• What website sent the visitor (Google, Yahoo, etc.)
• What keyword was searched that sent the visitor

And this list is just the beginning. There are many more advanced features that go much deeper into the data. Google Analytics also ties very well into other parts of your marketing campaign toolbox. It integrates with things like Google Adwords, Google Website Optimizer, Wordpress and MailChimp to name a few.

There are also many advanced metrics that can be pulled out of Analytics, some of them include:

• Goal and conversion tracking
• Cost per conversion (for an e-commerce website)
• Benchmarking (compare data points)
• Visitor Trending (compare times and days)

Conclusion

There is data and there is data overload. Google Analytics does an amazing job of giving you the basic information in a very elegant and easy to use interface. If you would like to dig deeper there is almost no end to what you can learn about your website and it’s visitors.