Analyse This – Getting Analytical with Google and your website

What do you know about the behaviour of the visitors to your website? Do you know where they come from, how long they stay, what pages they look at, what engages them and what makes them bounce. Google has a phrase about their free analytics software “Even if its not good news, its news that good to know”.

Initially, upon examining the statistics of your website, the results may be downright dismal. But Google are right, it is information that you need to know, otherwise, the money that you have spent on building and running your site, is wasted. Good news, anything that is measured improves. Once you can see where your site is doing well, and where its falling down, you are empowered to do something about it.

Here’s ten important features of the Analytics software:

1. How people find your site – analytics is going to show you the source of the traffic on your website, whether it was direct, they were referred from another site, or through a search engine. When the traffic results from a search, it will show you which keywords the visitor search for that brought them to your site.

2. How they navigate through it – this will show you which pages of your site the visitor entered from, where they moved to and where they left your site. Are they going where you’re trying to take them?

3. How they become your customers – set up conversion measures and goals, enabling you to track the efficiency of your pages in converting site visitors to customers.

4. Bounce rate – how many people get to your site, and click straight back off it because its not relevant to what they were looking for. This is often one of the most disturbing pieces of information that you’ll get about your site, but will allow you to change your content to be more engaging and relevant.

5. Absolute unique visitors – “hits” as a measure of website traffic is totally irrelevant. You need to know how many unique people have visited your site. Analytics will allow you to see this.

6. Returning vs. new visitors – another great feature is the ability to compare how much of your traffic comes from returning vs. new visitors. If people are not returning to your site, then something is probably wrong.

7. Schedule automated reports – don’t have time to be checking the stats everyday? Schedule periodical summary reports to be sent to you. Don’t rely on these only though, use them to highlight important issues, then start digging deeper.

8. Adwords integration – analytics can automatically integrate with any Adwords campaigns you’re running, allowing you to easily track your most successful ads and maximise your returns.

9. Target the best markets – analytics allows you to view where your traffic is coming from, by country and city. This can show you where you are being most effective, and

10. Share data with others in your company – you can create multiple accounts to manage and track the performance of your website.

There’s plenty more features, and the data gets very detailed, right down to what language, operating system and browsers your visitors are using. But don’t get caught up with too much of the fancy stuff. Start with a simple measure, like reducing the bounce rate of your homepage, and work from there. The improvement to the quality of traffic to your site, and the conversion of this traffic to customers will be worth it.