KEY POINTS:
You've probably heard of Google Analytics, the free, web-based application that has upped the ante for everyone interested in analysing their web traffic.
A common misconception is that because Google Analytics is free it's not as powerful as its paid counterparts. However, it actually began its existence
as Urchin on Demand, a US$495 per month subscription package, until Urchin Software was bought by Google in 2005.
Since re-branding it as Google Analytics and making it available for free, Google has continued its development. A new interface was released in May of last year and a series of enhancements have been made since then. It now offers over 80 distinct reports, most of which can be cross-segmented and manipulated in several ways.
What does it offer?
The Google Analytics interface starts at a main dashboard, from which you can navigate into five discrete areas and drill down into deeper reports. The five sections are:
Visitors: Access a range of information about your visitors; from the basic visit and visitor numbers to browser and internet connection types. Start-up favourite: A funky new report, based on Adaptive Path's Measure Map, shows where in the world (down to town detail) your website visitors are coming from. Why are Adaptive Path's lawyers not onto this? The company was bought by Google in 2006.
Traffic Sources: How much traffic is coming from each search engine; which other websites are referring traffic to your site through links on their site; and how many visitors are coming direct or through other sources. These reports are great for marketers. Start-up favourite: Link your analytics to your pay-per-click campaign, or tag links on your email and other campaigns, to identify which of your advertising efforts are most successful.
Content: Find out how many times each page has been viewed, how many visitors arrived or exited the site at that page, or which pages visitors navigated to next. These behaviours allow you to find your site's strengths and weaknesses. Start-up favourite: A new report introduced this year shows what keywords people use on your website's internal site-search box.
Goals: Google Analytics really comes into its own when you tell it what your website's goals are. These can be online purchases, leads or even media downloads. Analytics will tell you what the conversion rates are for each goal. Start-up favourite: Conversion funnels that show you which pages are the weak links in your conversion process.
E-commerce: If your site is e-commerce functional - that is, visitors can buy something, make a booking or donation - you should configure Analytics to capture e-commerce data. These report the value of the transactions, as well as which products and services were ordered. Start-up favourite: Knowing you win equal sales from an email campaign as from your pay-per-click campaign is great, but if your PPC transactions lead to twice as many products being bought, or products of twice the value, then this is much more valuable.
What's next with Google Analytics?
In case you think that's it, Google has recently changed its tracking code with a view to improving the reporting of events, such as file downloads.
It has also just introduced an opt-in system whereby you can anonymously share your own information with Google to receive industry standard comparison reports.
Ever wondered how your website performs compared to industry averages? This is the direction Google Analytics is now heading in.