The ability to analyse the shopping habits and traffic flow of visitors to a website with ease is one of the biggest benefits that online retailers have over traditional high street stores and the importance of installing analytics software onto a website should never be underestimated. Luckily one of the greatest analytical tools available to online business owners is completely free. Google Analytics is very simple to set up and tracks a huge quantity of invaluable information. In this blog post I’m going to explain how to set up Google analytics and go over some of the more basic ways in which you can use it to improve your business. In later posts I will go into more depth explaining how some of the more technical features can be exploited.
Step One: Get a Google account.
If you don’t already have a Google account the first thing you will need to do before installing Google Analytics is to register for one. This process is simple and can be done by simply clicking the “sign in” link in the top right corner of the Google homepage.
Step Two: Register for Google Analytics.
Once you have a Google account you should navigate to http://www.google.com/analytics and choose to “Sign Up Now”.
After signing in using your Google account details you will be asked to enter some basic details about the website that you wish to install analytics on.
Step Three: Install the analytics code.
After entering your website information Google Analytics will present you with a choice of three tracking codes to install on your website. The different codes are fairly self explanatory and depend whether you need to track data over a single or multiple domains/subdomains. You then simply copy the tracking code and paste it above the </body> tag at the bottom of each webpage that you wish to track (typically you will want to track every page on the site so ideally you will want to paste this into your template file).
You can then select the save and finish button on the Google Analytics page and the site will begin tracking your statistics.
After Analytics has been installed for a while (allowing a reasonable quantity of data to have built up) sign into Google Analytics and click to view a report. From here you will be presented with a number of graphs, tables and data that will give you huge amounts of vital information.
Site Usage
The Site Usage section provides basic information on visitor’s habits. The most important number to watch here is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of visitors that arrived on your website and then instantly clicked away from it. If the number of people bouncing away from your website is particularly high this should act as a red flag telling you that you’re landing pages need to be improved to retain visitors. This also could be due to bad keyphrase selection; the search intent of your keyphrases may not fit the intentions of your website.
Traffic Sources Overview
The traffic sources overview section provides you with some of the most important data for an online business. It not only tells you where traffic originated from but, for traffic originating from search engines, the keyphrases they used to arrive. This can prove invaluable for discovering what keyphrase you should target in any online marketing campaigns you may undertake. For example if a search engine lists you a page 4 for a particular keyphrase but it still brings a reasonable volume of traffic to your site you will know that it is a keyphrase worth optimising your website for. Conversely if you are optimising for a phrase that is bringing very little traffic you should consider changing to one that might prove more successful.
Map Overlay
The map can be useful as it shows where in the world your traffic is originating from. If you find you receive a huge number of customers from certain countries that rarely convert into customers it might be worth looking into adding the appropriate shipping options, languages and currencies that would make ordering from you seem more appealing to them.
This post only provides a quick look at the most basic features that Google Analytics offers. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to add a series of more detailed posts looking at some of the more technical features that the program offers; such as how to set up goal conversions, reporting and more so remember to che
Thanks for the tutorial. I use Google Analytics a lot. It is a great tool to see where you are making the most money.
Hi. I wanted to advise you that some parts of your web site are onerous to read for me, as I’m color blind. I am afflicted by deuteranopia, but there are other kinds of color blindness that may also experience issues. I will understand the largest part of the site OK, and the elements I have difficulties with I am able to read by employing a custom browser. Just the same, it’d be great if you can consider we color-blind types when undertaking the next web page re-working. Many Thanks.
Thank you very much for your comments. We aim to make this blog as usable as possible to everyone. The site is currently going through a redesign. Any pointers that would make it more usable to people with colour blindness would be very helpful.