Analyze This
Posted on Jul 17, 2009 by Molly Huff
Recently our agency had a crash course in website analytics…it was a conference call with one of our programmers who sped through a 45-page website – pointing out high points here and there – in about 30 minutes. Needless to say, we were all open-mouthed and a bit lost when the call was over.
I figured out, though (much to my delight) that this great and intimidating tool called Google Analytics is actually extremely user-friendly. As with most things, the learning is in the doing, so as soon as I took a deep breath, got a big cup of coffee and logged in (gasp!), all was well. In fact, it was better than well – this is the most amazing tool I have seen in ages. Once you learn how to maneuver the site – which is not at all difficult – there is a plethora of information at your fingertips. You can see how many visitors came to your site and on which day they came; you can tell which were Absolute Unique Visitors; you can see how deeply they delved into your site; how long they stayed, bounce rate, etc. etc. You can even see where – geographically – all of those users came from! It’s a little Big Brother, I know, but so cool.
One of the more amazing attributes of Google Analytics is the Traffic Sources tool. This function allows you to see where your users are coming from – whether they searched for you on a search engine (and G.A. even tells you which engine they used and which keywords they used to find you!), if they came to you through another site, or even if they typed in your url directly. From there, you can begin to use these tools and vast information to think about tags within your blogs and photos, and to start recognizing how it is that you grow your website’s presence.
I was able to present this tool to a client of ours, First Products, Inc. last week. I walked them through all of the high points – showing them the Visitors Overview, Benchmarking (comparing your site’s performance to other sites much like your own), Map Overlay (this is the Big Brother part), and Traffic Sources. They were just as excited as I am!
I am really excited that we can offer this tool to our clients – it makes the work and the thought that goes into producing websites and the ongoing Search Engine Optimization tangible. And that, my friends, is something to say in our industry.
Tagged: analytics, google analytics, page views, websites, first products, unique visitors, map overlay, search engine optimization, seo
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