google analytics

Google Analytics (or GA) is an enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives users rich insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

Not only is it incredibly powerful and very user-friendly but it's free to use.

GA tracks visitors from referring sites including search engines, display advertising, Pay Per click (or PPC) networks, email marketing and wider digital collateral such as links within PDF documents, and ties in this data with set 'goals' on your site (such as contact, registration or purchase) and even any e-commerce activity.

Google Analytics' interactive reports include valuable information about:

visits and visitors

Google Analytics includes how many visitors, the number of visits made by new and returning visitors, the number of pages viewed, how much time they spent on site, the languages and geographic location of your visitors and even their technical setup (including browser, operating system and even screen resolution information).

traffic sources

Google Analytics includes information about traffic coming directly to your website as well as traffic that came via search engines (and which search engines), and traffic coming via referring websites. This section also tells you what keywords were used to find your site and as well as the option to tie in any marketing campaigns you may be running (including AdWords, email campaigns, affiliate networks and so on), it also gives additional insight into what those visitors do once they arrive.

website content

Google Analytics also provides insight into the popularity of content on the site, including the top landing pages and top exit pages, any site search activity (where applicable), and any key 'events' you have specified, such as a piece of video content being played.

goals (conversions)

GA allows you to set up and monitor key pages on the site as goals, be it a sales confirmation, a registration confirmation or other. With this it allows you to identify the number of conversions, the rate of those conversions, the values of those goals and, rather importantly for usability, identify drop off rates within key processes.

There are of course some limitations to its effectiveness (for instance some Firefox add-ins are known to block the GA JavaScript tracking code) but that can be the case for a number of tracking solutions, both free and expensive.

As a free and in-depth analytics solution however we find Google Analytics an invaluable tool for helping to evaluate the comparative success of all our clients' online marketing initiatives and provide invaluable information to support any strategic recommendations we might make. At the end of the day we are looking for relative trends such as increases or decreases as a result of activity rather than total numbers.

Contact us today to find out more about we can help you understand your website traffic and marketing effectiveness using Google Analytics.