5 Reasons To Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free and powerful way to track the performance of your website. If you’re not already using Google Analytics, let me give you 5 reasons to do so:

Discover how customers find you. From the left navigation menu under Dashboard, click on Traffic Sources>Search Engines. This report tells you the traffic that all of the search engines have sent you, from the big cheese Google to tiny crumb Netscape. On the left side is a search box with a pull down menu with choices ‘containing’ and ‘excluding.’ You can exclude Google from the results this way, and get a feel for how many people come to your site from other search engines. Another nifty feature is the Segment box at the top of the page. You can segment these remaining results by keyword. This segment button also sorts by city, browser, operating system, and many other parameters to help you in an ad campaign.

Discover how your customers search. In Traffic Sources>Keywords select the ‘unpaid’ link to the left of the segment box. This view tells you the keywords customers use to find you that you are not paying for. Optmizing for these keywords would give your sales a boost without ads.

Discover where people leave your site. Go to Content>Top Exit Pages. If the majority of visitors leave your site from the homepage, you’ve got some work to do. Ask yourself some serious questions about your homepage layout and what you could do to make it more appealing and usable.

Discover your top referring sites. Referring sites are those sites that have linked to you and send you traffic. You may sort through these referring sites by both paid and non-paid links. Click on Traffic Sources>Referring Sites, then choose the Goal Conversion. If you have configured goals, this will tell you which of those referring links results in successfully meeting a goal. Usually goals are sales, but they can also be downloads or sign-ups. Which of the referring sites are successful for you? Don’t throw money at the sites that aren’t bringing you anything.

Monitor your email success. The links in your emails can be connected to Google Analytics so that you can tell which emails are effective at converting to sales. It’s easy to configure most email programs. Try this resource for coding emails, ROI Revolution. Once your email is coded, return to Traffic Sources>All Traffic Sources. Under the graph, click Show>Medium and choose ‘email’ as your medium. (This medium will be whatever word you chose when you coded the email. You could pick any word, but ‘email’ is the obvious choice. It could also be ‘newsletter’ or whatever word makes sense to you.) Within this medium you can track your conversions by email, region, or other factor.

This is but a handful of the ways Google Analytics can help the ecommerce webmaster. MightyMerchan’s article on using Google Analytics has more information on useful and easy-to-access reports. If you crave even more information than what Google Analytics provides for free, for a one-time charge of $100 MightyMerchant can configure Google Analytics’ Ecommerce statistics. This resource is not available in the standard Google Analytics interface but provides valuable information by linking all of these traffic sources and keywords to the revenue they generated, giving you even more control over your advertising spending and site optimization efforts.

Tags: google, analytics