Understanding Google Analytics

By Author: Rob Smith
Total Articles: 81
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For a website owner who conducts business through Google, Google analytics provides rich and in depth information of your website traffic and market. Google analytics is easy to use whilst helping to analyse your traffic trends in every possible way. You should always refer to Google Analytics while preparation of ads and planning of new market strategies in order to attract more traffic.

In order to avail the Google Analytics details, you have to add a small code before the closing tag of each webpage. You could do it either manually or if you are using CMS system, there are many plugins who do the task for you.

Once the code is installed, the data is collected every second while the reports get updated every 24 hours. You need to login and select your site on visiting the Google Analytics page. The first page to be displayed is the Dashboard which covers major and most important aspects of website traffic data.

The Dashboard is collection of panels which can be customized or viewed as per requirement. You can even remove some of the panels which you are not interested in. Some of the crucial panels ...
... which can be referred to are -

The Date panel - This panel has stored information right from the time the Google Analytics code was installed and can be used retrieve information period wise.

You can even check out the visitors to the site on each and every day. You could even check out graphically any of the 5 measures or even compare 2 measures with each other.

The Site Usage parameter shows page views, pages per visit and number of visits per page. You could even check out how many visitors left the site after visiting a single page. This parameter also keeps count of new visitors too.

For ascertaining from which part of the globe your website is attracting visitors, you could visit the map overlay section. This feature provides you with state and city level visit information.

The sourcing of the visit is also measured by Google Analytics. Google analytics checks whether the visit was sourced directly through the URL or from a search engine which implies an organic visit or a visit through a referral site. You can even obtain an extensive referral site report as well.

Users can even access the content overview panel which highlights the popular pages and number of page views.

Equipped with the export and email feature, you can avail them as per your convenience.

For ascertaining the visitor's history, Google Analytics provides a Visitors tab in submenu of options wherein you can get hold of technical information, comparison results of sites similar to yours in size. You could even get a detailed picture of visit history visitor wise with regards to number of visits, the length of visit and even how many pages they viewed during each visit. You can even go to the extent of availing technical information of visitor's Internet connection, speed and their support features as well.

Moving on to yet another most convenient feature of Google Analytics which is the Content Menu which is a tool preferred by SEO specialists who wish tot gain further insights into the site and user preference pattern. Important criteria which you can use are the pages which enjoy maximum page views, navigation summary which states how visitors moved within your site, the landing page performance, the preferred exit page, if it is not the confirmation page, you do need to worry about it. The data on popular keywords and phrases which attract visitors to your site and other statistical data can also be derived from Google Analytics.

Apart from these useful features, Google Analytics works in conjunction with Google Ad Sense enabling users to work out the pricing, avail information on ROI for paid search. With many comparisons and combinations possible within the measures, Google Analytics does prove to be useful for improving your site performance all the time.

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