Advantages of Google Analytics

Why use Google Analytics?

What are the advantages of using Google Analytics?  Google Analytics is the free successor to the previously commercial Urchin Analytics software.  Google Analytics is constantly being updated and improved, and is a must-have resource for your search marketing campaign.  It will show you valuable data about your visitors that you can use in combination with your Google Sitemap and other Google services... 

Viewing visitors by timeframe, geography, and source

One of the advantages of Google Analytics is that it will allow you to view how many visitors your site is getting based on a specified time frame (from one day to all time).  You'll be able to drill-down and see where visitors are coming from geographically, whether they found you via a search engine (and which keywords they used), or whether they were referred by another website. 

Viewing visitor details - from page views to bounce rate

You'll also be able to see details on your visitors, such as how long they stayed on your website, which pages they visited, which links they clicked on, and more.  The bounce rate reflects how many visitors bounced in and out of one page, and how many stayed longer.  This information will give you a good idea of which entry pages (pages visitors arrived via) need work (ie. if you have a high bounce rate for a particular page you'll want to adjust it's content to be more visitor friendly so they hang around longer).  You'll also see which exit pages (pages that visitors left from) need work, as these pages are the ones that caused visitors to leave your site.

What kind of computer and connection are your visitors using?

Another advantage of Google Analytics is that it will provide you with further data on your visitors such as which web browser are they using, what is their monitor resolution, what is their Internet connection speed (ie. dial-up vs. broadband), do they have JavaScript support turned on or off, etc.  This data will help your web designer optimize your website for the majority of your visitors, as you'll be able to view your own website from their perspective.

Analyze and compare your visitors' keyword usage

While we're not going to go into all the features Google Analytics offers (you'll have to explore those yourself, or we may offer up more detailed articles on various subjects down the road), we're going to highlight one of the most important advantages of Google Analytics:  the keywords traffic sources. 

By visiting Traffic Sources -> Keywords you'll be given a list of all the keywords, sorted by popularity, that visitors used to find your web pages.  Use this data to see how effective your search marketing campaign, in particular how effective your link building is, and find out which pages are bringing in the most visitors.  You can then analyze these pages, what you've done to promote them, and apply similar techniques to your lesser performing pages.

Combining analytics with adwords

One of the huge advantages of Google services is that they can all communicate and share data with each other.  This means you can use Analytics data together with AdWords and AdSense data to optimize all of your campaigns (read more about AdWords and AdSense in the next section - Organic vs. Paid Search).  We already showed you how you can use the keywords traffic sources together with your Google sitemap data to find out which of your keyphrases are performing the best, and which ones need work. 

In the AdWords section you'll be able to analyze your AdWords campaigns' effectiveness.  In particular, you'll be able to analyze specifically how visitors from your AdWords campaign are doing on your site, where they came from, how long they stayed, etc. (the same statistics we talked about above).  You'll be able to see which keywords are working for you and which ones are not, and thereby be able to optimize your AdWords campaigns.

Sign up for Google Analytics

We could go on and on, but I think I've highlighted some of the most valuable features and advantages of using Google Analytics.  The service is free, so if your website is already up and running, you'll want to sign up and install the tracking code.  Then, after a couple days of data gathering, take the time to browse around Analytics and discover all the nifty features for yourself.

Visit Google Analytics to sign up.

Next up: Organic vs. paid search

Now that you've gotten the basics of SEO, search marketing, and the advantages of analytics, I'm going to wrap up the discussion by pointing out the differences between organic and paid search.  You'll also learn more about Google's AdWords there.  Read Organic vs. Paid Search to get started.