Part I: Google - The “Analytics” of Google Analytics

Many of your websites may already have Google Analytics installed, but you may not be particularly be doing anything with that data. In this article I would like to discuss the real purpose of Google Analytics and share with you some interesting dimensions and metrics. Google Analytics is not a glorified hit counter. It is meant to be analyzed so that you can make educated business decisions for your site.

It will help you identify problem areas and give you the opportunity to do something about it. Then your website’s patterns and trends are meant to be studied year over year so that it can be constantly improved.  Below are just a few of the questions that analytics will help you answer about your site:

• How do I drive more traffic to my site?
• Where is the traffic coming from? (i.e. paid, natural search, direct links)
• What demographics should I cater to?
• What are the top landing and exit pages?
• How can I get more users to sign up for my product?
• What keywords have bought in the most conversions?
• How much revenue does your site bring your company?

If you do not have a Google account, go here to sign up for one http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html. If you need to sign up for a Google Analytics account, visit this site https://www.google.com/analytics/provision/signup.  There are 4 main areas that you are interested in: Visitor Information, Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals. I’ll describe each one and point out a few interesting dimensions/metrics that will aid you in learning the strengths/weaknesses on your site.

Visitor Information

Visitor information is important because it will show you details about what browser and connection speed is most used for visiting your site, from which countries/regions visitors came from, and whether your users were new or returning. With respect to visitor loyalty, you will be able to determine how many times they returned, how recent the visits were, and how in depth (i.e. number of pages during the visit).

Traffic Sources

You may also be very interested in your traffic sources – whether your users find your site through referring sites and which one(s), or direct links (i.e. user typed in URL directly), or whether they came from a major search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc. Also available to you are the top keywords users entered in the search engine which led them to your site. If you desire to improve your site’s visibility, you may want to pursue Google AdWords which will help you optimize certain keywords along with paid Ads on Google. Below is a breakdown of where your traffic is coming from and whether it was through natural search or paid (i.e. cpc stands for cost per click).

Content Pages

As expected there is a Content section within Google Analytics that will break down each and every page on your site and give you information such as the most visited page, top landing, and exit pages.

If you have a content management system, you can view your content by title so that you don’t need to recall which page maps to which content id. Some other interesting pieces of information available to you are navigation summaries (how visitors found your site) and entrance paths (which paths they utilized to ultimately get to your page). If your site has a search, Google Analytics will give you a summary of what keywords your users search upon within the website and what page results are returned.

One neat tool that I always love to use is the site overlay. It will show you the percentage of clicks for each and every link on any page you choose. Look at the screenshot below. You’ll notice that of all your traffic coming to this page, 7.7% go to “Affordable Radio Advertising” whereas only 2.2% go to “Targeted Online Advertising”. Under “Web Design Services”, you’ll see that 15% are interested in graphic design and only 3.3% are interested in viewing each of the links “card design & printing” and “brochure design & printing”.

 

This information tells you a lot about your visitors – of the services you offer, most are primarily interested in radio advertising and graphic design. You many conclude that only a small number of visitors are interested in online advertising and brochure design & printing. Or you may conclude that the placement of your links/ads needed to be re-adjusted. Could it be a coincidence that “graphic design” had the highest percentage of clicks because it was first on the list under “Web Design Services”? What would happen if I switched the placement of that link with the “brochure design & printing” one? I will discuss how to measure the success of an experiment like this in a future post on the Google Web Optimizer.

Goals and Funnels

Every website has at least one goal that the designer of the site intended to accomplish. It might be getting users to purchase my product, signing up for my newsletter, or informing the public about a certain topic. I would like to discuss how you can utilize Google Analytics to set up goals for your site and help you determine how much revenue it is really making for your company.

First of all you’ll need to define what your goal is. We have three types URL Destination, Time on Site, and Number of pages/visit. If the goal of your site is having users purchase a product, sign up for something, or complete an application, the goal you’ll set up is URL Destination. The destination page will be the URL to your thank you page (i.e. “thank you for purchasing our product” or “thank you for submitting your application”).

When setting up goals, it is also helpful to set up funnels. Funnels are concrete steps users will encounter along the way to completing their goal. For example, let’s assume your goal is to have visitors complete an application; the funnel points will be step 1, step 2, step 3, etc. within the application process. Once you set up funnels, you can monitor where users drop off in your application. For example, users may be leaving your site at step 2. If so you’ll want to analyze this step and ask why they might be leaving. Am I asking for too much data (i.e. making them list all family members and their history)? Is the data I’m asking for too sensitive (i.e. SSN, credit card information)?

Let’s look at another example … an online purchase. Look below at the funnel visualization diagram. You’ll see that 157,945 people viewed the product categories but only 38,783 people viewed the product, and only 12,153 actually added the product to their shopping cart. It is natural that as you progress downward towards the goal of a purchase, the numbers drop off as well. This is important information you can use to improve certain steps in the overall process.

 

In this article I showed you some ways of utilizing Google Analytics to get an assessment of your site – where traffic was coming from, when/where visitors were leaving, how long they stayed, which areas of certain landing pages receive the most clicks, which points in the application process users drop off.

Stay tuned for my next article on the Google Web Optimizer where I’ll show you how you can use all the GA information you gathered about your site to drive a series of experiments that will help you get more conversions.