As webmasters, all we need is one thing – Traffic. All our contents, knowledge and skills depend on how well we can attract the customers or clients. It is the customers who tell us how much our skills worth. So, for the webmasters and bloggers, it has become vital that they should understand their customers better than the others. This tool will help you do all those to make you understand the visitors better.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool from Google that helps you understand the customers of your website. It gives you even minute detail about the visitor of the website. It provides a lot of data that you find it interesting to use. For marketers it will help you to fix a target and write contents for those group. Since bloggers have to do all tasks, Google Analytics will tell you where you have to concentrate to improve your blog.
Even though there are many website statistics tools are available in the market and many of them are free, Google Analytics remains the famous and most preferred among the Bloggers and Webmasters. Google Analytics made this by providing even the minute of the details which the user wish to get.
Adding the Code
You can start using Google Analytics just after you got your website/blog verified by Google. It is simple too. All you need to do is just sign up for Google Analytics with your Google Account. Then set up the profile for the site. It is a step-by-step process and you will be script generated to add it in your site.
Add the JavaScript code once just above the and the theme will use it for every page. Adding the code to your website will not affect the site in anyway.
Once the code is read by Google Bots, your site is ready to be monitored by Google Analytics.
What can you measure?
Once you are connected to Google Analytics, these are all the information you can track with Google Analytics.
- Visitors- This shows how many people have visited your website along with their country, city and the language they speak. This will help you target people geographically or based on language.
- System- This shows the system configuration such as Browser, OS, System Provider, versions of OS and Browser. It will help you if you want to know the things before moving on to a new design.
- Traffic Sources- This shows the sites from where the users are driven to your website/blog. You can find the traffic is search traffic or referral or direct one. If it is a search traffic, you can find out the keywords, matched search query and source.
- Goals- Goals section will help webmasters to fix targets and analyse their growth towards their goal.
- Contents-This tab will help you which of your content is popular. You can find out site speed, site search and even AdSense trends when it is integrated with Google Analytics.
- AdWords- If you are doing some advertising campaigns in Google, well you can monitor that with Google Analytics.
Dashboard
This is the control panel of Google Analytics. It gives all the information Google Collects from your site in one place. An user can add upto 12 widgets in the Dashboard. You can customize it and add any number of dashboards.
You can also set the dashboard seen by others using URL or E-mail or you can download as a PDF file.
Time Range
This is one awesome feature in Google Analytics. You can see the visitors in days you choose to see and analyse the trends on the particular day or a time. Not only that. You can compare a time with another time in past and see the progress of the website.
Comparison
Google Analytics lets you compare the visitor and analyse by comparison against various parameters. In the ‘Standard Reporting’ tab you can find the graph of visits by default. By clicking any one of the following parameters like percentage of new visits, average time in the site, bounce rate etc.. you can monitor in a better way.
Report
You can share the reports in any of the forms you like- E-mail, Export as CSV, TSV, TSV for Excel. PDF Export is available too and it is recommended.
Where you should concentrate?
In a report like this, there are few things you have to concentrate.
- Increase the pages/visit of the user.
- Reduce the bounce rate by increasing the returning visitors.
- Increase the average visit duration by keeping the users engaged.
It’s now your turn to go for Google Analytics. Let us know the feedback from you!
Thanks for this, really helpful, I’ve just started using Google Analytics and it’s such a powerful program. Thank you for helping me get my foot through the door understanding the basics! Nice one. Is there any really easy way to track keywords? Say I wanted to track android tablets throughout my site, is there and easy way to do this?
Thanks for the comments Tom!
To track keywords, you can use the ‘content’ tab and under ‘site search’ you can find the keywords that relates queries to your site.
To track any device, in your case Android Tablet, under the ‘Standard Report’ tab, under Mobile, you can find the system and keep the track of users using tablet pc.
Let me know if it clears your doubt Tom!
Very nice post..this is very important for every SEO related person that he or she must be have knowledge of Google analytic.
Thanks!
Hi Christopher,
Google analytic is one of the best free tools available to analyze your blog traffic and behavior of your visitors.
If you are master of it then you can plan your next business activity accordingly by analyzing your visitors location, their age, and source.
Sandeep,
Thanks for sharing your views with us! I agree with what u said.. Mastering Google Analytics will help you forecast your business well in advance!
Hi CHristopher,
This post looks like overview of Google Analytics and amazing way to expose here. Great Chris!
Hi, Thanks a lot for the encouraging words! I have written another post related to Google Analytics, “How to get the most out of Google Analytics”. I hope it helps you!