What is Google Analytics?
Website owners that want to understand who visits their site and what visitors click can use tools like Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that allows website owners to collect and analyze data about how viewers find, view, and interact with their website. This information gives the site owner the ability to understand how to optimize their website for search results and determine what visitors like most about the site, and what don't find useful. This data helps website owners to make changes that can increase traffic, sales, and the usefulness of the site to visitors.
How does Google Analytics work?
Anyone with a website can signup for a Google Analytics account on Google's website. The standard account is free. Once enrolled in the service, you or your website manager will need to insert a special code in your website that allows Google to collect data. After installing the tracking tool (you may need help from a developer), data is collected and available for logging in to your Google Analytics account. Google keeps all the reports and information in your account for as long as your account is active so you can easily compare historical information.
What data is collected?
Almost every website software can collect information on the number of visits. Google Analytics goes into greater depth. When a visitor clicks on a page, a “session” is started and tracked. For the entire time that the user is on your website information about what they do is being collected.
Here are just some of the usage statistics collected:
- How many users visited by day, week, month or year
- How many total pages were viewed
- Percentage of users who were new and returning
- Number of pages did the average user visit
- Average time each user spent on your website
- Number of users by country, state, and city
- What browser application was used
- What operating system was used by desktop and mobile user
- How many users found your website through search
- What search keywords were used when someone visits your site
- How many users found your site by typing or clicking on a link
- What sites refer traffic to your site
- Referrals from social networking sites
- What pages on your website do people visit when they visit and when they leave
How is it useful?
If your website is for business or professional use, collecting and analyzing this information can help you understand not only how many people visit, but what they do when they visit. It's like watching someone who enters a grocery store and collecting information on what aisles they visit, what items they look at and how long they spend in any one location of the store, whether they make a purchase or not. This type of information is useful to any business that's trying to understand what it's customers find most appealing, and that's how you can use it to help improve your website value to your visitors.
For example, the most frequently visited page that new visitors land on when they visit is the article “6 Things to Know about Emoji and Emoticons.” This page was responsible for almost 40% of all the visits. The second most visited page is “What's the Difference Between 3G or 4G and WiFi.” This type of data tells me that my site visitors are interested in technology about mobile smartphones. In fact, the top five web pages visited on my website from search engine clicks are on mobile technology topics. So for me to drive more traffic to my site, a strategy would include more articles related to this subject.
With this information in hour hand, you can improve your website value by focusing on content that your visitors like best, add content that can help you appear in search results, and understand if there are problems with any of the website by looking at the path people view before they leave.
Free and paid service levels
The paid service level called Premium includes the assignment of a dedicated account manager from Google, training from Google experts, and a variety of 24x7 support capabilities. The pricing, at $150,000 per year, is aimed at high volume websites rather than small businesses and entrepreneurs. But the Standard free plan is more than enough and far better than the simple site visitor data collected by most website management software and will help you understand your website traffic.
To my way of thinking
For marketers, this is invaluable information and those website owners that use Google Analytics, or any other analytic tool, can improve the performance of their website and their business goals.