10 Reasons to Use Google Analytics By: Errett Cord

One : It is Free Google Analytics Google Analytics is a very comprehensive website analytics package that provides a user friendly design interface. The charts are easy to understand and make data collection and analysis much efficient. Providing business owners and clients with meaningful information is a necessary business function but when Google Analytics is free to everyone, all you need is a Google Account?

Two: GA Interface Google Analytics Google Analytics can be displayed to provide easy to understand data formats, charts and graphs with several view options for every report. If you have no statistical or analytical background, you can easily understand the good and bad and measure performance improvements or losses due to the data or site comparison chart options. Google Analytics also shows the good numbers in Green and the bad (negative) numbers in red.Google Analytics

Third: Connect to Adwords Google Analytics Google Analytics and be connected to your Adwords account. Having ecommerce turned on and applying your cost data, you can view your cost and revenue associated with every Adwords campaign and Ad group. This will make ROI analysis much easier. You can sort your groupings by goal or Ecommerce conversion rates, or even the provided ROI field and focus on the strong performers or remove the weak ones. The ROI field will not take into consideration the cost of goods sold, so you may need to export to excel. Still using GA will make this process much more efficient.

Four: Customize GA The Google Analytics tracking code is embedded in pages you’re tracking. You can setup the session timeout, campaign timeout, set keywords to ignore, add organic sources and set custom campaign fields. Using filters will allow you to include/exclude based on dozens of options giving you the ability to provide profiles as specific as you need. The GA standard tracking script for most businesses will meet their tracking requirements.Google Analytics

Five: Event Tracking Event Tracking is a new feature that provides a new level of flexibility in Google Analytics. Event tracking allows for tracking actions associated with flash objects, dynamic rotating content, movie players, interactive buttons and complex forms. You can create custom tracking solutions for any type of activity on a site and associate site usage. Ecommerce and goal conversion data can provide a whole new level of traffic and visitor usage data analysis.Google Analytics

Six: Support There are many support options available from reading one of the Google help forums, reading one of the many books available, engaging in one of the several Webinars, or consulting with a Google Analytics Qualified Individual (GAIQ) to help you setup a custom solution, interpret and understand meaningful data, or to provide ongoing consultative support. Because Google Analytics is free, there is a large community of users and you are not likely to be the first to encounter an issue and chances are high there is already some great information available online to help you.Google Analytics Qualified IndividualGAIQ

Seven: Segmentation Google Analytics Google Analytics provides a solid understanding your website’s user behaviors. There are several ways to segment traffic but the easiest is with the user-defined segmentation Google Analytics provides almost out of the box. There are additional snippets of code that have to be embedded and you can setup filters to isolate these segmentations once triggered providing you with detailed unique website stats for these variations in your users. This provide you with the ability to measure testing and marketing success at a very detailed level.

Eight: Search Google Analytics newest feature is the ability to track your internal site search. This tool will provide you an understanding of what your visitors are trying to find on your site. As with most of the reports in Google Analytics, you can associate goal and ecommerce data by selecting one of the several reporting views. This will provide you with a source of keywords that you insight to your site’s ability to convert from your of your campaigns. The site search feature also allows you to adjust your internal navigation and create a more user friendly website that will make conversions a little easier for your visitors.

Nine: Benchmarking Google Analytics Google Analytics can provide insight with the beta benchmarking feature. This feature allows you to compare key performance indicators with like businesses in similar industries so you can benchmark your success against your competitors. This benchmarking feature builds value as more people sign up for it because your ability to specify your industry will become much more in accurate. You can see your traffic, bounce rates, pageviews, and other great metrics in relation to competitors to determine your weak or strong areas and can build website optimizer testing to strengthen you site’s presence on the web.

Ten: Everyone uses GA Google Analytics Google Analytics has 69% of the analytics market share. Google Analytics provides a high level of insights to your competition. If you aren’t using a detailed analytics package such as Google Analytics with a resource allocated towards analyzing it and taking action, you are handicapping your company’s web capabilities and might as well start handing over market share. Contact me for help with Google Analytics.Google Analytics Contact me for help with Google Analytics.

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