Yes, I know. “Why Come” is at best, very bad English, and at worst… hell I don’t know.
But the point is, it’s MY blog and I’ll do what I like… mine I say!!!!
I was saying something right…?
Oh yes.
Since I gear my site towards online entrepreneurs who aren’t knee deep in the world of internet marketing and/or search, who are more Web 2.0 types, even in the midst of wondering what that is, I wanted to give a little bit more of an insight to (a) What Google Analytics does and (2) why you might want to use it.
(I know. usually b comes after a, not 2. See the statement above. 
I’m a bit wacky, and it’s time you realized that.)
So what are Analytics? Fancy word, for what essentially boils down to stats. But not just a measure of your website statistics. Knowing how many visitors you have and how many of them buy is half the battle.
Being able to track where a visitor came from, what page they landed on, where they went next, and what page sent them on their merry way is very useful information for helping your audience enjoy their user experience, and of course, to help you find the holes in your site that may be costing you sales/subscription sign ups/et cetera.
So there’s the what and the why of it all. Leaving us with the how.
How does Google Analytics come up with the information about yon website? (And what is my current obsession about the words yon, yonder, hither, et al? I can answer at least one of these questions…)
When you go to the Google Analytics page and sign in you enter information about you and your site, read the terms and conditions, and get some code to place between the head tags in your pages. After a couple of hours, you can log into your account to see changes.
(How to sign in? All you need is your password if you use any of Google’s other services, and a free Google account if you don’t, which you can get from a link on that same page).
Then, any part of your online audience that isn’t blocking cookies and javascript leaves their footprints on your site, which you can then follow with the software.
It hasn’t been long enough for me to see the effects of this on one of my sites, so I’ll have to tell you how close it is to the other version of Urchin later.
So what can you do with this information, and why should it matter to you?
Here’s an example. Let’s say you launched a new product, and put this code on your sales page, the blog post where you announced it, and in the products section of your site. (You can put it on all your pages, up to 5 million impressions without being an AdWords client. Or for a $5 AdWords deposit you can have unlimited page views.)
You could tell what percentage of people read about your new product in your blog and ended up at the sales pages, and either left or bought. You could find out where else they came from, and change your pages accordingly. If your product page yielded many visits, but a lower conversion rate that the rest of the site, you might then find that you need a better description of what is on that sales page to get the click through.
In fact, you could test changes to just about any part of your site and then measure the effects.
If you’re not hosted by a fine company like Alpha One Tech, you might find yourself without the proper tracking software. Maybe your stats tell you that you got 500 visits from Google, but you can’t break them down into Google, Google Reader and Google Blog search. And perhaps you don’t know what page they landed on, how long they stayed, or where they went in your site next.
Some people are understandably reluctant to do any tracking of their visitors with the idea that they might be invading their privacy. If you’re one of those people, you might think of it this way….
In a brick-and-mortar store, you can see where all your prospective clients are wandering around in the shop. One of the things this observation can teach you is that certain parts of the layout are difficult for customers to manuever in, or that certain products are harder for them to find.
You don’t want to do retinal scans and have salespeople who harass your clients right out of the store, sure. But if you can assist their buying or browsing experience without penetrating their right to anonymity, then, wouldn’t you?
I’m one of the freakishly paranoid types that I speak of – I still won’t put a GPS thingy in my car… I do know, however, that every site I go to keeps some type of server logs, it’s just that most people don’t download them and run them through a software program. So I’m fine with accepting a tracking cookie… and so are most folks who accept the Net as part of life.
The ones that don’t will probably just block the cookie, anyway…
Back in a few with other Google Analytics posts. And news from other search engines, though some of it is a few days old…
Tags: free traffic :: website promotion :: SEO :: Google
