Learn/Crash-Course-in-Google-Analytics
Revision as of 22:06, 13 July 2010 by Aliza Earnshaw (talk | contribs) (→Now what?)
Google Analytics is a free tool for analyzing the behavior of visitors to your website. You can use Google Analytics to see how many visitors come to your site every day, how long people stay on your site, and where visitors are coming from.
As you make changes to your site, you can also track how these numbers change. That information can help you decide how to improve your site.
Getting Started with Google Analytics
- 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.
- Placing a piece of JavaScript code on your website is the next step in setting up Google Analytics, and it's the only step that requires any kind of technical expertise. Google provides the necessary code snippet and instructions, as well as an alternative set of instructions for less technical folk. If the code installation instructions seem daunting, you can hand the process over to a friend with website design experience.
- Once the code is installed, go to Google Analytics and log in with your Google Account from Step 1. Note that you won't have much data to look at until the code has been on your site for at least 24 hours.
Now what?
Once you're logged in to Google Analytics for your website, you'll find most of the useful and straightforward features in the top left navigation box: "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. This can give you a list of meaningful pages to improve.
- 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. This can let you know if your recent SEO or link building campaign did the trick.
- Under "Visitors" you can find out which web browsers your visitors are using most and which countries they are in. This can remind you of which browsers to test your website 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 know the things that did and didn't work.
Need more help? See Google Analytics Help and the Google Analytics blog.
See the post about this list on the AboutUs weblog.
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