Google Analytics is a tool that lets you look at the traffic that comes to your website in a more granular fashion. Google Analytics lets you see where your visitors are coming from, how long they stayed, what they looked at and what page they landed on. Knowing this information helps you determine what changes, if any you need to implement in your traffic generation techniques.
What are analytics?
Analytics software, lets you gather stats for the current traffic that comes to your site. If you don’t already have an account, go get a Google Analytics (GA) account. Google makes available, for free, a suite of tracking/ analytics software that a few years back used to cost several thousand dollars upfront plus a maintenance fee.
The type of data that Google makes available to you lets you determine where your traffic is coming from, what keywords they are using to find your site and whether your visitors are coming from organic (read free) or from paid traffic such as adwords.
Some web hosting providers make awstats or some other traffic measuring software available to you. The awstats software runs at the server level and gathers data with little to no interaction needed on your behalf. In my opinion, awstats is a good backup to the data that Google gathers, but the Google data, since it’s more conservative, just seems more reliable.
How do you use Google Analytics?
It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
- Login/ create your Google analytics account
- Add/ create a profile for your website
- Install the tracking code into your website
I should also mention that you’ll want to verify that the analytics code is properly installed to your website using the “verify code” button, but I feel like that’s part of the “install the code” step.
That’s really all there is as far as how to use Google Analytics. interpreting the reports and getting the all of the information out of the different reports is where it gets complicated.
Bonus Tip: You can track more than 1 website under your Google Account. No need to create multiple logins to track multiple sites. All you need to do, is create/ add new profiles for each site that you’re interested in tracking.
Keep an eye open for a short demo video!
