How to make the most of Google Analytics – Part 1

Analytics, by textbook definition, means “the science of logical analysis”. This pretty much means using common sense when analyzing something. Website analytics applies to people who own sites, or marketers, and more, but let’s focus on the marketers group right now. Google happens to offer a service called “Google Analytics” for those marketers.

Google Analytics

There is a service offered by a popular site, Google, that gives the user very descriptive details about the visitors (rather, the visitors computers) when they enter a site. This service is called Google Analytics. (We will refer to Google Analytics as GA from here on). The main advantage of this service is that it’s shooting for marketers, (people or companies that sell things, services, or time online, in this sense) rather than going for technologists and webmasters, where the origin of web analytics stems from.

GA tracks all your visitors that were referred, meaning sent to your site, by search engines, display advertisements (such as banners), pay-per-click sites (where people get paid to click on ads), marketing through emails, and links within written documents.

Adwords

Adwords are advertisements attached to keywords. Meaning, if you’re looking for “gardening” on a search engine, any ad with the keyword “garden” will show up for your search. Users who have GA can check their online success by tracking the quality of the landing page (the page that the advertisement takes the visitor to, maybe your homepage or another page on your site) and their goals. (Also known as “conversions”, meaning how many people they can “convert” from lookers to buyers). Goals may contain sales, viewing a certain page or blog, downloading something specific from your site, anything you choose your goals to be. By using these goals and GA, marketers can decide which ads are bringing in the most customers, therefore cutting down on advertising costs and/or the maintenance time it takes to keep them running.

Dashboard

A dashboard is almost like a control panel for your analytics. Imagine that analytics is like your car, the dashboard is all the meters behind the steering wheel, telling you all about the mechanism without you having to get into the nitty-gritty part. Through GA, you can determine which pages are successful and which ones are failing based on where the customers came from (on the web, what referred them to your site), how long they lingered on one specific page or product, their geographical location,