Monitor Your Site Using Google Analytics

A vital component in running any successful business is measurement. Without systems in place to measure how one’s performing it’s tough to improve performance and to adjust to the ever changing market conditions. Websites are no different. In the past we used to talk about “hits” to a website. The problem… this meant practically nothing. Fast forward to today and it’s amazing what you can learn about you site visitors from a good web analytics system. The great news is that while many of the better systems of the past required a hefty outlay of cash, our friends at Google offer their Google Analytics product for free. Even better news is that for most small to medium sized organizations, the Google Analytics product typically performs at a level that more than meets their needs.

For those new to owning a website, the wealth of information provided by Google Analytics really is impressive! The information available about your visitors can be vital when working to fine tune your site. Just some of the many reports included in the product include:

• Number of visitors
• Geographic location of visitors (town level)
• Bounce rate
• Visitors Web Browser
• Visitors screen resolution
• Most popular pages
• the search terms the visitor entered in the search engine
• site overlay (Shows a page of the site and overlays it with the number of visitors that clicked on each of the links on that page. How cool is that! )
• Traffic Sources

And a host of other very useful information about how your visitors are finding and using your website.

Setup and Installation

To get Google Analytics all that is required is to setup a Google analytics account by going to www.google/analytics. Once you are signed up Google provides a Javascript snipped of code that needs to be installed on every page your website that you wish to track. Typically this means adding this to the template for content management system based sites or to a footer include member. Once installed, run Google’s test to verify that the tracking code was installed correctly. You’ll start then see data in about a day.

Important to Note

Because Google Analytics uses Javascript to collect data nearly all search engine web spider traffic will not show up on your reports. This is because nearly all spiders surf with JavaScript turned off. This is good since search engine traffic should not be considered traffic from a site analysis point of view. Unfortunately, there is a small minority of people that surf the net with JavaScript turned off. These visitors will not be counted in the results. Which brings up an important point. For any given website different analytic tools will show different results. For this reason it is important to view the results as indicators of trends. It’s not the exact numbers that matter but the your specific site trends. It should also be noted that Google Analytics does have a reputation for under reporting the number of visitors, but for most it’s really not a big deal. For those that require more than can be delivered by the free tool from Google, there are plenty of other solutions form other vendors offering more robust (and expensive!) solutions. But for the typical small to medium sized organization it’s hard to go wrong with at least first trying out Google’s generous offering.