Free Website Analytics From Google.
Posted: Monday, October 26, 2009
by Bryan Bishop
Are you tracking? No... You should be ... it's free...
Sorry folks - in this instance, ignorance is certainly not bliss! If you don't know who's visiting your website and from where, you stand little chance of truly optimizing for greater revenue.
As an online marketer of goods or services, this, of course, should be your definitive goal.
Sign up is easy and it's free!
To take advantage of this amazing wealth of free personalized information, create your account at Google Analytics. If you already have a Google account simply use your existing email and password to sign in.
Creating an account is simple and takes only a matter of minuets to complete, after which you're provided with a pre written snippet of Java Script to insert into each page you wish to track.
To insert the script, you will first access the source information of your pages, i.e. the HTML, from within your html editor (NVU/Dreamweaver for example) by simply selecting source.
Copy and paste the entire script into the base of each webpage on a new line immediately above the tag. The whole process takes minuets and you should start receiving tracking data within 24 hours.
When your account is setup you can easily view your analytics page form the Google browser; see top right, search settings, Google account settings, analytics.
From the analytics page select an account to be viewed; again top right, then select View reports to access your account Dashboard.
In the dashboard you see a linear graph representing data collected over a 31day period. This is the default time frame, which can easily be customized by selecting the date drop down and opting for a preferred time span from calendar or date range box. Date range performance can also be compared within this feature.
This graph is viewable in six metrics; Number of page/site visits. How many pages were viewed. How long the viewer spent on the page/site. Bounce rate i.e. proportion of visitors viewing only a singe page, and the percentage of unique (1st time) visitors to that site/page.
You may also compare these matrices against each other in a single view form page view tab, or even view all data at a glance in the site usage feature - six individual mini carts located below the main chart.
The Visitors Overview again shows the number of site visits which may vary from visit stats, with some visitors visiting the site numerous times. In-depth statistics can be seen via the view report drop down.
Map Overlay displays the geographical location of visitors, with stronger colors depicting visitor density, again more detailed information is obtained via view report.
I'm sure by now you can already see the great potential in this data - and it gets better. Traffic Sources Overview details exactly how your visitors arrive at the page or sites, via search engines, referring sites etc, and with the more detailed stats in view report you can readily start building a more focused strategy for traffic generation.
Finally, Content Overview gives still more viewing history data, including the top five most viewed pages, entrance paths, entrance keywords, click patterns and more.
I hope this brief report will launch you in the right direction - Go take a look at this great free resource at Google Analytics.
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