Making the most of your web site using Google Analytics

Analytics is the next tool we'll look at, and this is an important one too.

What is does is give you very accurate and useful information about your sites visitors and content, and shows you where changes need to be made.

Setting it up:
The process of setting it up is typically easy, you go to Google Analytics, set up a free account, and it gives you a snippet of code which has to go on each page of your web site. This bit may be a job for your web developer. If you know where to find it you go to the tag at the end of your web page's code, and just in front of it paste the code snippet that Google Analytics gave you. If you use a content managed system you may be able to place this code in just one place, and the system will publish it on every page. If your web site is static HTML then the code will need to go on every page. Now you are up an running. The Analytics account will tell you that it is receiving data from your web site.

Using Analytics:
Next you have to make the best use of the data. It takes a little time, but there is clear information within Analytics to help you learn it.

Here is a summary of our favourite features:

1. You can add a number of different web sites to Analytics, and monitor them all.
2. The Dashboard shows your overall traffic figures and a view of other aspects of your site at a high level.

3. The Visitors tab tells you some useful stuff, like the geographical location of your web site visitors, the proportion that are new or returning, and more.
4. The visitors tab also tells you the language of your visitors - if there are significant foreign language visitors would your site benefit from including additional languages?

5. Traffic sources is very important. It tells you the proportion of your visitors coming from "organic" search, links from other web site, and those that have just entered your site name directly. On the right it tells you which keywords people have used to find you, which tells you something about how effective your site optimisation and marketing has been, and which keywords might be best to target in the future.
6. "Keywords" tells you more about the keywords visitors were searching for when they found you, and how long they stayed. If one Keyword brings lots of visitors who all "bounce" back out again or do not stay on the site for long, perhaps that is not a good keyword to be targeting.

7. The Content tab tells you which of your pages are performing well. If a page has a high "bounce" rate then you may want to improve the copy of that page - this indicates that it is not enticing your visitors to stay around.
8. Within "content" the "Landing Pages" section is important, telling you which pages people landed on first. This gives you a clear idea which of your pages is being indexed by the search engines and attracting real traffic. Be careful when changing your top pages as they are a great asset.
9. Top Exit pages is just as important. If lots of visitors are leaving from a page, should you take a look at making that page more attractive or useful?

10. We've saved the best to last, and this is the "Goals" tab. Essentially goals are when your visitors to your site do what you want - i.e. buy something, or sign up for something. All you need to designate here which pages on your site represent goals, and then enter those pages here. These pages might be the "Thank you for your order" page, or "Thank you for joining our site". You can also give each order a value which is vital in the future. This allows you to work out whether your Ad-words campaigns are working. For example if it is costing you £200 worth of advertising to achieve each £100 sale, then that campaign (of part of a campaign should be improved or stopped. However if it is costing you £10 worth of advertising to achieve your £100 sale, then carry on - your campaign is working a treat.

There is a lot more to Analytics than outlined above, but I think this shows you something about the type of functionality that is available to you.

It is important to get Analytics on to any site you are concerned about developing, as it tells you what you are doing right and doing wrong, and eventually how to make your site more profitable.

To set up an Analytics account: https://www.google.com/analytics
For further information: Making the most of your web site with Google Analytics