An Overview of Google Analytics

Do you want the ability to track your web site traffic, see where your visitors are coming from, look at the keywords they used to find you, see where in the world they are, and analyze which sites are sending you the most referrals? If so, Google Analytics might be able to help.

I am certainly no expert at using Google Analytics, but I would like to share some of my experiences with it, and hopefully encourage you to make use of it on your own web site. This is not meant to be an exhaustive article on the subject, but is aimed at giving the basics as well as an insight into some of the useful features.

Here Comes Another One!

A long time ago (at least it seems that way to me), when I set up my first web site, I was amazed to learn that I could add a hit counter to the page to let me know how many visitors I had – wow, I thought that was a really cool thing to have at the time! Of course, it didn’t really tell me very much – except how many people visited the page. I had no idea where those visitors came from, which pages they looked at, how long they stayed, or even why they came in the first place!

This was back in the days when even the search engines didn’t know what SEO meant! But now, of course, things have changed and search engine optimization has become almost a mandatory component of running any business with even the tiniest online presence.

A key component of any system is feedback, and SEO is no different. We want to know how effective our search engine optimization efforts have been in driving traffic to our photography web site, and in providing the user with a positive experience on the site. Only then can we further improve the SEO of our web site, increase traffic and encourage visitors to stay longer.

Obviously, a simple hit counter just doesn’t cut it any more. Neither do the basic stats packages that are bundled with most web hosting.

Enter Google Analytics…

I’ve got to hand it to those guys at Google – they can be insanely smart sometimes, and I personally think that Google Analytics is one of those occasions. They took the basic idea of web stats and evolved it from the equivalent of a single-celled organism into a complex beast in a single giant leap.

Getting Started:

Despite its apparent complexity, Google Analytics is very simple to set up and use. To get started, just visit the Google Analytics web site.

You will need a Google Analytics account in order to proceed and then it’s a simple case of setting up a profile for each web site you would like to track.

Google Analytics will provide a piece of tracking code you can paste into each page of your site that you want to track. The code is simply a fragment of JavaScript that goes at the end your web page, just before the </body> HTML tag.

For more experienced web developers, and depending on how your web site is coded, you might be able to store the tracking code in a separate file, and then use a server-side include command to insert it into the end of each page automatically. I use this particular method on my sites, since I can make use of the include commands built into PHP.

Once the tracking code is installed correctly, Google will begin to accumulate statistics about the traffic to your site – an amazing amount of! It boggles my mind to realize that they capture as much information as they do without impacting the performance of the web site very much at all. It really is a remarkable piece of information technology.

Google Analytics Reports:

At its simplest level, Google Analytics allows you to track four different sets of statistics about your web traffic:

• Visitors
• Traffic Sources
• Content
• Goals

Visitor Tracking:

Visitors to your web site are tracked according to their geographical & network locations, the amount of time spent on the site, the browser and type of computer they used, their connection speed, the number and identity of pages viewed on the site – and a host of other useful metrics.

Traffic Sources:

This section measures the number and identities of referring sites, keywords used in searches, actual search engines used and counts of direct visitors. It even keeps track of visitors that are responding to Google AdWords campaigns, if you have any set up.

Content:

This shows your top content, the top landing and exit pages as well as a complete content drilldown of the entire web site.

A great feature of the content analysis is the ability to see a navigation summary of the web site from any page. For example, your home page can show you where people went next and so on. Or, you might want to find out where visitors went after looking at your wedding photography pages. Perhaps you find that a particular page is causing more than the average number of people to exit the site. You can use this feature to identify potential problems with the site, which you can then try to fix.

This is a very useful feature indeed and can give you a good idea of the average way that visitors view your web site. Based on this information, you might want to make some organizational changes to the site navigation to bring important, but less frequented, pages to the forefront.

Goals:

This is one of the more advanced and extremely useful features of Google Analytics and allows you to set visitor goals that can be tracked. For example, I have a goal set up that allows me to track those visitors who fill out my “request more information” form on the wedding photography section. This information gives me a useful idea of conversion rates, based on the number of people completing the goal from those who just visited the page. It gives me good idea of how effective the site is in convincing visitors to take action.

“Average Page Views” and “Time On Site”

When I first started to use Google Analytics, I was amazed to see average visitor times of only a few seconds on some pages! It was painfully obvious to me that the often-quoted phrase of “you only have 5 seconds to impress” was not far off the mark at all! After redesigning the pages and rewriting the content, I’ve been able to gradually improve the average time spent. Even so, it’s still incredible to me how little time people will actually spend on a page.

The number of pages viewed on average by visitors is also interesting. I believe this is a good indicator of the overall effectiveness of the web site. Obviously, it does mean that visitors are clicking on internal site links to visit other pages, but it can also indicate a potential problem – for example, if they need to click too many times to get to the page they really want to see. This statistic is probably best appreciated when you consider it along with the total number of pages on your site, and with a look at the navigation summary.

“Bounce Rate”

For some reason, I found the bounce rate statistic fascinating from the very beginning. This basically counts the number of visitors who land on your site and then immediately leave your site to go elsewhere.

You can even see the bounce rate associated with each keyword or referring site, which is an excellent source of information that you can use for site optimization.

To me, this metric obviously shows that the affected page is either not very relevant to the visitor, or not sufficiently interesting for them to stay and read more. Either way, something needed to be done to get the bounce rate to come down from its original alarmingly high rate!

I started by making sure that all the pages on the site were correctly keyworded and that the content was both relevant and as interesting as I could possibly make it. Slowly, but surely, I was able to get the bounce rate to come down to more acceptable levels, although I suspect that it’s fairly normal across the web to have bounce rates around the 30% level, given the flitting nature of many Internet users. I would be interested to know if there’s a general average bounce rate that might be considered normal.

Trends:

One of the really great features of Google Analytics is the ability to discover trends over a period of time. An overview is shown at the top of most pages as a convenient graph over your chosen timescale, and shows the various ups and downs over time. It makes it very easy to notice variations in visitors, bounce rate or any other of the available metrics in the Google Analytics system.

Sometimes we can associate these trends to specific site updates or the sending out of marketing information – an obvious indicator of whether the action was a success or not.

These trends have a variety of applications to your business – for example, you might want to look at the trends over the course of an average week to determine which days might be the most effective in an AdWords campaign.

Summary:

This has been a fairly simple overview of the Google Analytics system and I hope it’s given you at least a fair insight into a tool that can greatly increase the overall effectiveness of your web site. Google Analytics is very easy to use, despite its complexity, with a wealth of help and answers to frequently asked questions built into it.

If you’re not already taking advantage of Google Analytics to take control of your web site, I would highly recommend it.

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Photography Website SEO google analytics, search engine optimization