Google analytics – brilliant!

I’m going to give Google a plug today, I think they deserve it.

For a while now we’ve been playing around with Google analytics. And what an amazingly powerful system of website performance reporting it is! Best of all, it’s free.

Most of you who own or run a website would have seen some form of Web analytics software that usually comes along with your hosting plan. The most common (free) analytics packages web hosting companies offer include Webalizer and Awstats.

Webalizer and Awstats are fine for checking the basics, i.e. how many people stopped by your site, where they came from, how long they stayed and what keywords they used at various search engines to find you, but that’s about it.

Then there’s the next level up, where you’ll often pay extra (please correct me if I’m wrong)

· Livestats,
· Clicktracks and
· Webtrends

Arguably, Webtrends is the most accurate, powerful and expensive option, with many of the major websites (globally) using the Webtrends solution.

Considering the Google analytics is free, it’s by far the best option for the rest of us!
It’s very easy to set up; it just requires you to create an account and add a small piece of code to the bottom of each page. One great feature is your ability to create your analytics account through your Google AdWords control panel, linking it to your AdWords account.







Google Analytics allows you to do all the basics, but there are several features which provide terrific insights into how people actually use your site. One feature we looked at recently was “site overlay” – where we’re able to see how people navigate your website while looking at your site! See an example below…

In the case of one particular client (a large ecommerce website in the UK), we were able to visualise the most popular products based on navigational clicks, as well as the actual revenue generated by those clicks.

They had dedicated a large amount of their home page real estate to various “specials” (which ironically weren’t receiving many clicks) so we recommended they change the home page “specials” offering to include the most popular products. This immediately increased click-through’s and revenues.

There’s way too much to go into on this humble post about all the Google analytics features available, but I do highly recommend you create an account so you can gain real insights into how people use your website.

For more information, take the Google analytics tour.

Plug, plug, plug.

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