Google Analytics and why your website needs it

The desire for, and use of, web stats was originally driven by webmasters and people on the technical side of web builds. Stats were used to understand the user journey and therefore how it could be improved. A whole industry was created around this with products such as Web Trends and Hit Wise providing detailed information to clients about the visitors to their site. Google Analytics, as with most Google products, changed the game in web site analysis. 

A Marketers Tool

Google Analytics was a departure from paid for web stats software.  First of all, it was free -everyone’s favorite price. Secondly, the layout of the reporting made it accessible to marketers as well as webmasters. This meant that the stats and visitor journey information was monitored and analyzed by a marketers eye as well as a technicians eye. As they look for different things – a marketer tends to look for opportunity while a webmaster looks for problems and fixes – the analysis of the traffic was more rounded. This helped enhance a sites performance. 

Tracking the health of your site

The main reason to use Google Analytics is to ensure that over time you are aware of the traffic coming to your site. Knowing how many visitors come, what and how many pages they go on, and where they were referred from allows you, as the marketer, to leverage this information to enhance your site and target your marketing. 

1)   Enhance your site – understanding what makes a page popular informs your content writing and advertising placement strategy. For example, if one particular page on your site gets a lot of traffic perhaps by creating or downloading a “you may also be interested in…” widget you can drive that interested reader on to other relevant information and keep them on your site for longer. With the information Analytics gives you, you may decide to put more advertising on the most popular parts of the site.

2)   Target your marketing – knowing where your visitors are coming from, and in what numbers allows you to decide where best to advertise or to link with. For example, if your traffic mostly comes from search engines perhaps you need to work on ensuring you have more back links. This brings the number of referring sites up and improves your overall SEO. 

Tracking Ad Sense Revenue

Where Google Analytics has the edge over its competitors is that the analysis of web trends through Analytics can be linked to an Ad Sense account. Ad Sense, Google’s advertising revenue share model for publishers, is a way for web publishers to make some money out of the content they have on their site. By understanding how you make your Ad Sense revenue, i.e. what pages people tend to click on the adverts and in what numbers, it allows you to adjust your usage of it. This is radical and how a lot of content rich websites ensure that they continue to make money from audience journeys. 

Google Analytics is great open source software for tracking web trends. Easy to incorporate in coding, and with an equally easy to use dashboard, it allows the less technically efficient marketer to drill into site usage and understand where opportunity lies.