Google Analytics – What is it ?

Web Analytics, as per Wikipedia the definition is — Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

The science of web analytics can very well be divided in to 2 main categories –

1. The tasks associated with analyzing activity on a website.
2. Software or services used to perform analysis

Typically web analytics includes the measurement of a website’s audience/ visitors (potential business) , reach ( visibility), interaction, collaboration on content creation (buzz in form of comments).

If one has to define the use of web analytics software in one line it would be – A tool to take decisions on how to optimize Online Business/ Online site.

Today there are thousands of analytic software and solution providers. Some are free to use and some are paid. Prominent ones are

1. Quantcast
2. Omniture – now an Adobe company, recently developed analytics apps for facebook and Twitter
3. Yahoo analytics
4. Google analytics
5. Conduit
6. Webtrends
7. Visistat
8. Clicktale
9. M Factor

For the sake of avoiding TMI and not to scare anyone with the $$ required to use these solutions, I am restricting this blog post to basics of Google Analytics or GA as it is called in short ( read with love <3 ).

Some facts of GA –

1. Offered by Google ( yes no points for sharing it J )
2. Basic features are FREE to use, just sign up using your google/ gmail account
3. Offers great customized reports and alerts thereof
4. Is flexible and customizable. Offers tracking API
5. Provides cross channels tracking – mobile tracking, multimedia, flash, video tracking. Easily tracks the usage of your Ajax, Flash, social networking and Web 2.0 applications.
6. Analytics are very easy to share and communicate
7. Excellent Visual data available
8. Google Integration and reliability

A SNEAK PEEK INSIDE – TYPICAL GA ACCOUNT

1. Intelligence – This report shows a list of custom and automatic alerts for daily metrics in the date range selected.
   

   intelligence google analytics

2. Visitors –
   1. Overview – How many people came to your site and how extensively did they interact with your content? This traffic overview allows you to drill down and view the characteristics of different visitor segments and examine the different factors that make up visit quality (i.e. average pageviews, time on site, and bounce rate).
      

      visitors-overwiew-google-analytics

   2. Benchmarking – Learn how your website’s statistics compare against industry verticals. Use benchmarking data to gain broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.
      

      visitors-benchmark-google-analytics

   3. Map Overlay – Use this map to visualize volume (visits, pageviews) and quality (pageviews per visit, conversion rates, per visit value, etc) metrics by geographic region. You can select a metric from the pulldown menu above the map. Click on any region to zoom into the next level.
      

      map-overlay-google-analytics

   4. New vs Returning – A high number of new visitors suggests that you are successful at driving traffic to your site while a high number of return visitors suggests that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back. You can see how frequently visitors return and how many times they return in recency report and the Loyalty report, both under Visitor Loyalty in the Visitors section.
      

      New-vs-Returning-Visitors

   5. Languages – Which languages do your visitors prefer to use and how do these groups of visitors differ with respect to site usage, conversions, and other metrics? This report captures the preferred language that visitors have configured on their computers. Understanding who your visitors are is crucial to developing the right content and optimizing your marketing spend. Many times, geo-location is not enough. Many countries have diverse populations speaking different languages which present important market targeting opportunities.
   6. Visitor trending –
      1. i.      Visitors – this report shows you how many visits you have per day / date range on your website.
      2. ii.      Unique Visitors – How many people came to your site? This report graphs people instead of visits
      3. iii.      Page views – Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a general measure of how much your site is used. It is more useful as a basic indicator of the traffic load on your site and server rather than as a marketing measure.
      4. iv.      Time on site – Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your site.
      5. v.      Bounce rate – Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
   7. Visitor Loyalty – Loyal visitors are usually highly engaged with your brand and a high number of multiple visits indicates good customer and visitor retention. A high number of new visitors (i.e. those at the top of the table) indicates strong visitor recruitment. On this histogram, your most loyal visitors are shown on the bottom and your new and least loyal visitors are shown at the top.
   8. Browser Compatibility – Which browsers do your visitors use? Optimizing your site for the appropriate technical capabilities helps make your site more engaging and usable, which can lead to higher conversion rates and more sales.
3. Traffic sources – This report provides an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie-chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. “Direct Traffic” is visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. “Referring Sites” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. “Search Engines” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result page.
   

   traffic-sources-google-analytics

4. Content – This report provides an overview of pageview volume and lists the pages (Top Content) that were most responsible for driving pageviews. Entrance Points allows you to monitor the bounce rates for your most important landing pages. Consider redesigning any of the pages listed here that have a high bounce rate.
   

   Content-google-analytics

I could not cover all the features and aspects of Google Analytics in this post as I have not used those features myself and thus, did not have the stats to show about those features.  One cool feature is to track how many mobile users are visiting your site / blog . See the pic below.

In case the number of visitors are considerably high you might want to consider making your site / blog mobile optimized. How you do that for free you can read my previous blog post on this.