Difference between revisions of "Learn/Crash-Course-in-Google-Analytics"

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If you have the time and desire to poke around, there are many things that you can learn about your website in Google Analytics. With any luck, some of this information can help inform decisions about the design of your website, your next product or marketing campaign.
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If you have the time and desire to poke around, there are many things that you can learn about your website in Google Analytics. With any luck, some of this information can help inform decisions about the design of your website, your next product or marketing campaign, and let you things that did and didn't work.
  
 
Just remember to use the information that you learn, and don't let it be a waste of time.
 
Just remember to use the information that you learn, and don't let it be a waste of time.
  
 
''Need more help? See [http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/ Google Analytics Help].''
 
''Need more help? See [http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/ Google Analytics Help].''

Revision as of 21:25, 12 July 2010

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Who's on your site and what are they doing?          RetweetIconSmall.png FacebookShareIcon2.png    GoogleBuzzIcon.png
By Kristina Weis
email or post a comment for me


Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool. With Google Analytics you can see where you website stands for several key metrics, like traffic (number of visitors), how long people stay on your site, and where your visitors are coming from. You can see how these numbers and graphs change as you make changes on your site, and this can help inform future improvements to your site.

How to get started with Google Analytics

  1. If you already have a Google Account, you can sign in to Google Analytics. If you don't have a Google Account, you need to create one.
  2. Placing a piece of code on your website is the next step in setting up Google Analytics, and this is the only one that requires a technical hand in your site. This piece of Javascript code is what does the tracking on your website. You can find the necessary code snippet and Google's instructions here (alternative instructions from Google here). If need be, this is something that any web design person can do for you pretty easily.

Now what?

Once you're logged in to your site's Google Analytics, most of the useful and straight-forward things are in the top left navigation box: like "Visitors", "Traffic Sources", and "Content".

To give you a taste:

  • Under "Content" you can learn which pages on your website get the most visitors in a given period of time, or which ones people don't stay on as long.
  • Under "Traffic Sources" you can see which incoming links to your site are sending you the most traffic and what percentage of your visitors are coming from search engines.
  • Under "Visitors" you can find out which web browsers your visitors are using most and which countries they are in.

Tip: When you're looking at graphs, remember that you can change the length of time displayed to make it shorter, or to go back in time as far as you had the Google Analytics code on your site.

These are the simpler things that can be found on Google Analytics, but there are also more sophisticated metrics that you can look for and define.

Can I do more?

One more robust feature is "Goals", where you can tracks specific metrics for things that really matter to your business -- like getting more visitors to your "thanks for your order" or "registration complete" page, for example.

Google Analytics currently has a feature that is in beta, called "Intelligence Reports". Here you can set up alerts (that can be emailed to you) when a metric of your choice changes in a way that you set. One useful alert could be for anytime your number of visitors drops by more than 50%. This could alert you of a problem like your website or host being down, or your advertising campaign being turned off.


If you have the time and desire to poke around, there are many things that you can learn about your website in Google Analytics. With any luck, some of this information can help inform decisions about the design of your website, your next product or marketing campaign, and let you things that did and didn't work.

Just remember to use the information that you learn, and don't let it be a waste of time.

Need more help? See Google Analytics Help.

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