Recently, Google Analytics redesigned their interface to make it more visually appealing and easier to use. I decided to give it a test run on a few of my sites around April 19, and have been quite pleased with the results.

If you’ve bought web hosting, chances are that your web host provides you with a web statistics package. The main problems with most of these are that they aren’t very accurate (ie they may count search engines as people) or they aren’t very detailed (ie they only tell you things like number of visitors, page views, and other barebones minimums). Some of the packages I’ve used have a difficult time with dynamic urls (like page.asp?myID=1 or page.asp?myID=2) - they only show me the traffic hits for the sum total of page.asp rather than each one, so I can’t see a complete traffic picture.

Google Analytics goes into an incredible amount of detail for a free package. They offer graphical trends over time, so you can see your traffic trends, how many pages people click on per visit, how long they spend on your site, and where visitors are coming from.

But this is just the basic snaphot. When you dig deeper, you have a wealth of information. The best feature is something called “goals” which allows you to set up metrics based on your business objectives. So if you want someone to purchase something on your site, you set that up as a goal. If you want someone to join your mailing list, that’s a 2nd goal.

Even cooler, you can integrate your analytics account with your Google Adwords account, so you can see how much you’re spending per conversion.

Another great feature is the “site overlay” map which will tell you click pattens. Google takes a screenshot of your page and then shows you the number of clicks each link gets, so you know what’s capturing your visitors’ attention.

It’s easy to get so caught up in driving traffic to our site that you forget about your business goals - actually getting prospects to take action. Google Analytics is a great tool to help you measure what people are really doing on your site.

Random Posts

• What is Search Engine Marketing and Why Should You Care?
• Increasing AOL E-Mail Delivery Rates
• Some Interesting Articles About Blogging
• What is Marketing?
• Advice for Launching a New Service