Thursday, February 14, 2013

GOOGLE ANALYTICS


GOOGLE ANALYTICS SLICES AND DICES DATA MORE WAYS THAN A RONCO VEG-O-MATIC


The second most asked question about web sites after, “How can I get on the first page of Google?” is “Who is coming to my site?” Enter Google Analytics. GA slices and dices statistics about a site’s visitors more ways than most mortal men can digest. “GA tracks visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.”*

Google Analytics is free and as with all Google products you get a lot of bang for your buck. And did I mention Google Analytics is free?

So how do you do this? Go to www.google.com/analytics and set up an account. There you will get the full Monty about site data analysis. If you have a Google Gmail account you’re already signed up. Just use the same username and password to log into Analytics. The how-it-happens is that Google generates a snippet of code that gets pasted into each web page you want tracked and within 24 to 48 hours you will see report data. Of course the basic thing to track is day-to-day traffic to judge the effectiveness of your site’s performance.

Furthermore, “GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.”*

The big caveat to using any data tracking system in an attempt to find out “who” is coming to your site is that you cannot ascertain a visitor’s specific personal data like name, physical address, phone or email address. The closest you can get is the IP address they are viewing your pages from.

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