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Using Google Analytics on Your Website
A Simple, Powerful and Free Tool You
Need to Master. In a nutshell, and at its most basic level, Google Analytics lets you monitor the traffic to your site and what they do when they arrive at your site. Setting up the service is relatively straightforward. Once you log in to the Google Analytics admin area using your Google account, you should see a link to add a website profile. Google will ask you to either place some code on your site, or upload an HTML page to your server to prove that you are the owner of the site. Once you've done this, you’ll be able to make full use of the service. The first step you’ll need to take is to place a piece of code on every page you want tracked. This code is very small, and all you have to do is copy and paste it onto each page of your site. If you use XSitePro for building your web sites you’ll be able to do this in seconds by clicking on the ‘Other’ tab, selecting ‘Global Scripts’ and pasting the tracking code into the box provided. That’s pretty much it as far as setting things up is concerned. As soon as you’ve got that code in place, and you’ve republished your web site, you’ll be able to track some very interesting things. For starters you will be able to see how much traffic you are getting. Of course, you can get that kind of information by installing a little JavaScript counter at the bottom of your page, but Analytics gives you so much more information than just a basic hit count! Using the Analytics Dashboard you will be able to see how many unique visits you've had, how many page views you've had, the average number of pages each visitor views on your site, and the average length of time each visitor spends on your site. You can also get an overview of where your traffic comes from, and which pages are viewed most often. In the visitor’s information section will find out more about the people who are arrive at your site. You can find out which web browsers they’re using, how many of them are new and how many are returning visitors, where in the world they come from, and even what language they speak. This information can be extremely helpful in knowing whether you're targeting the right people, and whether your visitors like your site enough to return. In the traffic sources section, you can find out where your traffic is coming from. You can find out the number of direct traffic hits, which is generally people who typed your url into their browser, and how much of your traffic comes from the search engines, and which search engines in particular. It can also tell you what keywords your visitors used to find you in the search engines. Plus, if you're an AdWords user, you can get additional information relating specifically to AdWords. In the content section, you'll discover which pages are being viewed, which pages were most often the first entry page, and the path that your visitors tend to take through your site. You can use this information to track whether or not visitors are able to navigate through your site properly. Finally, in the goals section, you can set up all types of goals to track. You can track how many visitors made it to your sales page, how many made it to your download page, or how many signed up to your mailing list.
Analytics really is one of the most
powerful free tools available to Internet marketers and it’s
one that’s well worth checking
out. About Paul Smithson - Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software development, and maximizing the potential of on-line businesses.
Source: http://www.xsitepro.com/using-google-analytics-on-your-website.html | ||
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