In this tutorial I will show you how to use Google Analytics solution.
Google Analytics is a free web-based tool to analyze traffic on websites. It's working since 2005 and nowadays it's very popular and widely used. To use it you have to login to this service and copy-paste generated JavaScript code into your website. After installing it you can analyze various data such as number of visits, time spent on your site, place from where your site was visited and much more. Additionally you can easily integrate it with another system from Google - AdWords used for online advertising, so it's possible to optimize ads to check which one is working best. There is also a possibility to export data in various formats like CSV or XML.
When you decide to use it you have to remember that there are a few limitations. One user can add up to 50 websites to analyze and if you're not using AdWords there is also limitation of 5 million page views per month. If you have AdWords campaign on your websites the number of page views can be larger. What's more there are some filtering programs or extensions for web browsers that can block Google Analytics. Also if users don't have JavaScript enabled or don't accept cookies then it won't work. As a result some visits are not included in statistics. However the cases when Google Analytics don't track certain visits are rather occasional, so this tool is useful nevertheless.
To access Google Analytics you can login with your gmail credentials. However if you don't have an account just click on the link create new account. After logging in you'll see an overview where all your web sites will be listed. To add a new website just click on the "Add new profile" link. Here you can see an example of overview page with 2 websites added:
After clicking "add new profile" link type an URL address of your website and choose your time zone and then click on "Finish" button. Then there will be displayed JavaScript code that you have to copy-paste to your website. Remember to paste it before closing
tag.
This piece of code sends all necessary data from your website to Google servers. Then you can access this data through Google Analytics. Now go again to overview page and you'll see a profile that you have just created. In the beginning status of this profile will be inactive but after you add JavaScript code generated by Google to your website, status will change to active if everything is working well. Underneath you can see example of active and not active status:
After you have successfully created a new profile you can click on "View report" link to see more details. Firstly you'll notice dashboard - a page that presents the most important statistics. There is a graph of visits but you can modify it to present other data such as number of page views or bounce rate. Then there is a widget named "Site usage", you can see there number of visits, number of page views, pages/visits ratio which shows you the average number of pages that each user browse per visit, bounce rate that is the percentage of person who left your website just after seeing your launching page. Generally the lower bounce rate the better because it means that your landing page is interesting for users. You can also find average time spend on your website in "Site usage" and percentage of new visits.
In other widgets you can see "visitors overview" - it shows you on a graph how many person visited your site each day. Then there is a map with number of visits from different countries. You can check also sources of traffic on your website such as search engines or direct traffic. In "content overview" there is a possibility to find out which subpages of your website are visited most often.
Besides dashboard there are much more options in Google analytics, I'll present some of them to you.
In Intelligence tab you can set various alerts that inform you about changes in traffic on your website sending an email or SMS to your phone. This service is currently in beta version, that means that it's still being worked on. There are many options that you can set in alerts:
In visitors tab you can get all information about people browsing your website. For example there is a map that shows you density of traffic from different countries. What's very useful are statistics about users that show their browsers, operating systems, screen resolution and so one. Thanks to this information you can adjust your website for your users settings. What is getting more and more important nowadays is traffic from mobile devices. They are gaining popularity really fast and you should keep this fact in mind designing your website. In visitors panel you can check also statistics for mobile devices.
The next tab is traffic sources where you can check how your visitors get to your website. In the following picture you can see options of this tab:
Traffic sources is very useful if you promote your website somehow for instance by positioning it in search engines or starting AdWords campaign. You can analyze keywords and all other factors and see if your promoting strategy is working or not.
Then you have the content tab:
You can analyze there which of your pages are most popular and how much time users are spending there. It is very useful when you're creating a new content for your website.
Finally there is a goals tab where you can set various goals to achieve. These are pages that are finalizing some business transaction such as confirmation of registering or buying something. After setting a goal you can analyze statistics for it. <noframes>Your browser doesn't support frames.</noframes>
To sum up Google Analytics is very useful tool for all people who want to promote their websites. This platform offers a lot of options and additionally Google is still adding more. So I suggest all of you who already have or want to create a website to familiarize yourself with this tool.