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Effectively Using Google Analytics: A Beginners Guide (1/3)

Using an Analytics tool on your website is a critical part of your online marketing plan. Analytic tools allow you to quantify your online marketing efforts, the data collected means that you no longer need to make blind faith online marketing decisions. Many new users to any analytic tool get overwhelmed by all the reporting metrics available to them through their analytics tool. This article is meant to help get your small business over that first hurdle, we'll focus on Google Analytics because it's by far the most common tool people coming into eBusiness Connections use or have heard of.

Part One: Understand The Jargon
When first logging into Google analytics you will come across a "Dashboard", the dashboard is simple a quick view of some key metrics. By default you should see the following reporting options:

• Visits
  Represents the amount of people who have visited your website in a selected time range.
• Pageviews
  Are incremented each time a page on your website is viewed.
• Pages/Visit
  A "Visit" can have many "Pageviews", the Pages/Visit report divides "Pageviews" by "Visits" giving you an average number of pages viewed per visit.
• Bounce Rate
  Ever found a web page, realized it’s not what your looking for and immediately left the website? That’s called a bounce, the "Bounce Rate" lets you know what percent of "Visits" to your site are bounces.
• Avg. Time on Site
  The Report represents the average time each of your "Visits" spent on the website.
• % New Visits
  The "% New Visits" report lets you know what percent of your website "Visits" are new.
• Map Overlay
  Breaks your "Visits" out into Country, Province/State, City originating locations.
• Traffic Sources Overview
  Where did the traffic to your small businesses website come from? That is what the "Traffic Sources Overview" report let you know. There are three core traffic sources inside Google Analytics they are:
  • Direct Traffic:
    "Visits" who typed your website name into their web browsers (Not sure what a web browser is? Your not alone) address bar.
  • Referring Sites:
    "Visits" that came to your site from another website.
  • Search Engines:
    "Visits" that came to your website via Google, Bing (formerly MSN Live Search), Yahoo, Ask or any of the other search engines on the market.

• Content Overview
  Breaks out the popular and not so popular sections of your website, there's lots of options inside this report. It's well worth taking your time to see what is inside this section.

I would also strongly suggest spending a few hours looking through the Google Analytics Help section and reading Avinash Kaushiks well written "Web Analytics Demystified" blog post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.