What To Look For In Google Analytics

The importance of a powerful analytics program is often overlooked, but you must know that knowing how to use such a program (for example, Google Analytics) is necessary for a successful search engine optimization or SEO campaign. Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool designed to help you understand every aspect of activity performed on your site or web page. You must understand what Google Analytics is and how to use it in order to achieve success in terms of your conversion rates and more.

If you don't use it you can't have a clear view of what is currently working for your web site or page.

Google Analytics is a free web site statistic measurement program that you can use to track your web site (or page) traffic sources (including search engines and other referrers such as display advertising, PPC networks, email marketing, etc), content performance and best keyword performance, effective and ineffective methods in your SEO efforts, visitors (their geographic location, and how long they stay on each of your pages).

Detailed reporting features of Google Analytics include graphs and charts so that you can have a visual look at your statistics. Many analytic packages provide keyword-management reports (including Google Analytics) which can be of great help for basic keyword and pay-per-click campaigns.

Google Analytics can be combined with Google AdWords program to provide paid keyword tracking and information. This means that you can examine online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions or goals (for example, sales, revenue based on keywords, increase the number of visitors who complete specific transactions, etc).

To use Google Analytics you must have a user name to access the program. This means you have to create an account and install your Google Analytics tracking code on your Web site. You can access Google Analytics easily if you already have a Google account. If not, you can open your free Google account at www.google.com/accounts. Google will provide you with a snippet of text that you need to copy into the coding of your web site. This is a hidden page tag called the Google Analytics Code (GATC). To learn more about the code and how to install it, please, follow the link above.

Once you have logged in to Google Analytics, you can add your first web site profile by entering your web site address and selecting the adequate time zone. Officially, you can add up to 50 profiles or web sites to your Google analytics account.

Accessing the tracking capabilities of Google is easy with Google Analytics. If you have the Google Analytics tracking code installed, the tool will insert or transfer data from the web, collect and analyze the information about the way visitors reach and interact with your site (or page).

If you use the following features with Google Analytics:

Ø  Set and Track Goals feature – you can target the right keywords in your SEO efforts. Google Analytics will help you to find out ahead of time what keywords are already converting for your site so that you can target those keywords until you reach the top rankings in SERPs.

Ø  Apply Filters feature – you can track certain parts of your site separately or exclude certain traffic from reports. For example, if you add filters to exclude your own IP address you will prevent your own internal traffic from distorting the data about your true site performance. Also, you can track specific directories located on your site, which is very helpful with multiple accounts on a certain web site or separate profiles. Larger sites having multiple areas (forums, blogs, resource directories, etc) will find it most useful.

Ø  Track External Clicks feature – you can track how many clicks you are sending to external sites if you are promoting affiliate offers (such as Amazon or ebay) or setting up traffic trades. Nevertheless, this feature is of no use if you monitor the accuracy of the affiliate program's statistic reports. On the other hand, if you are sending a great amount of traffic in terms of traffic trades, this feature is helpful in negotiating better link placement.

Ø  A great benefit of tracking external clicks is having your bounce rate explained. If you would like your web site or page to perform well, you must learn what bounce rate in Google Analytics means.

Ø  Automate Reporting feature – you can set up automatic e-mail reporting to keep track of your site's progression. You can define what information you want to have reported and when (decide on time intervals between reports).

Ø  Find keywords feature – you can easily decide which keywords to target by informing yourself about those keywords that are already working for your Web site. Keeping track of keywords sending you traffic is very simple through your traffic sources in Google Analytics. Combining this feature with goal tracking feature can help you with conversion rates based on keywords.

Ø  Track E-Commerce feature – you can track the amount of revenue generated from each keyword driving traffic to your Web site and moreover, you can track purchases at your site to the original user who actually made the purchase. The latter actually presents a weak point of Google Analytics according to some experts and non-experts as it raises many privacy concerns (the privacy issue is based on the capability of Google to track a visit through the IP address of the visitor). The feature may be very useful if you list products for sale on your site, though.

According to Alexa Internet, the subsidiary company of Amazon.com, 57% of most popular sites such as twitter.com and myspace.com use the Google Analytics web application.