Website analytics. March 19th, 2010.
So you’ve just launched a shiny new website, how do you know if its helping your business?
Web analytics are now so much more than just a tool for measuring website traffic. They can be used for business research or market research, they allow you to understand what’s working on your site, and what isn’t, allowing you to fine tune your website to make it even more effective. They can even help you to measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns by showing how the traffic to your website changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign.
Yes, website analytics are a must for any new website and at Giant Peach we recommend Google Analytics. Google Analytics does everything! It provides you with crucial information about your website, your website visitors and, if used effectively, it will help you to reach great heights in your online marketing efforts.
Below are some of the basic bits of information you can get from Google Analytics (there’s so much more!)
Number of Visits / Visitors
Google Analytics records both visits and visitors on your site. Visits stand for the number of individual hits initiated by all the visitors to your site. This data helps you keep a track of the progress you are making in attracting new and existing visitors to your site.
Number of Page views
A page view is a request to load a single page of an Internet site. An easy explanation of Pageview is the total number of times any page is viewed. For example; if a visitor lands on page X, goes to page Y, and then back to page X, that is counted as 3 page views because there were 3 page loads. This is great for learning what pages are most popular on your website.
Traffic Sources
This data gives you the Source through which a visitor reached your site. There are many ways in which a visitor can get to your site, the main source of traffic being Search engines – predominantly Google – as that’s where most of us start our online experience! From this you can see if your website optimisation is working, or that Ad you placed with that online directory. Is Yell.com really worth the money? Using Google Analytics you’ll know after a month.
Map Overlay
This is section is pretty impressive, it gives a diagrammatical view of the geographical location from where visitors visited your site. It can be broken into Country, Territory and City.
Time spent on the site
How long do you think people spend on your site?
Top Landing pages
Landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an Ad or a search engine result link.
Top Exit pages
Exit page is the page from where a visitor leaves your site. It can be interpreted as a page where viewers didn’t find what they were looking for and so went elsewhere.
Keyword typed in search engine
A keyword is an inquiry expressed in the form of a word or words that your visitor typed into Google in order to find what they’re looking for – your website. This is a very important data.
Google Analytics can be put onto your website in minutes… so what are you waiting for?
