One Giant Step for Webkind
Ok, So I'm not Neil Armstrong. But think of the importance of Google is to the Web. The innovations started at Google over it's short life have been tremendous. But for someone interested in improving their organic search and reducing advertising cost, Google Analytics the first step anyone should take.
Where have you been?
Without historical data how do you know what changes to your website is proving successful. Analytics provides you that historical data. For purposes of demonstration, I'm going to provide an example of a real website, vacationtours.com as an example of Analytics Power. Historically, this website had very few hits until some changes were made to improve the website. The example will also show some very interesting and cool features of Analytics.
A start
So how to start. First you need a Google account. Easy enough to do. After you sign up for a Google account, the next step is to sign up for Analytics. Once you've signed up the next step is to add the website to analytics. All you need here is the url of the website and select Add Website Profile. Once you've added the website profile, Analytics will provide you code to put on your pages. The code is a javascript code which gathers information about the user. Just cut and paste into your web page the data google provides.
Short code, but important items to note. First you will see two java script tags. That is because, the second code has to wait for the ga.js script to load before it executes. ga.js is the heart of the analytics program and provides information to Google to gather the data it needs to report on. You can view the API on Google's code website. http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi.html
A look at the Data
So what kind of data does Google Analytics provide. Here is an overview picture of vacationtours.com.
The first page is an overview of your website statistics. You are able to select a date range you want to drill down on. A nice graph provides trend data of visitors. There is an overview of site usage. A visitor overview which has visitor specific data. A cool feature of a map overlay. Lets you drill down to the location where users are coming in from. If users use proxy servers, the location is from the proxy server not the end user. A graph of traffic sources and finally an overview of which page the user selected. Note for this to work, the analytics code must be on that page.
Ok, So I'm not Neil Armstrong. But think of the importance of Google is to the Web. The innovations started at Google over it's short life have been tremendous. But for someone interested in improving their organic search and reducing advertising cost, Google Analytics the first step anyone should take.
Where have you been?
Without historical data how do you know what changes to your website is proving successful. Analytics provides you that historical data. For purposes of demonstration, I'm going to provide an example of a real website, vacationtours.com as an example of Analytics Power. Historically, this website had very few hits until some changes were made to improve the website. The example will also show some very interesting and cool features of Analytics.
A start
So how to start. First you need a Google account. Easy enough to do. After you sign up for a Google account, the next step is to sign up for Analytics. Once you've signed up the next step is to add the website to analytics. All you need here is the url of the website and select Add Website Profile. Once you've added the website profile, Analytics will provide you code to put on your pages. The code is a javascript code which gathers information about the user. Just cut and paste into your web page the data google provides.
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-9776939-2");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
Short code, but important items to note. First you will see two java script tags. That is because, the second code has to wait for the ga.js script to load before it executes. ga.js is the heart of the analytics program and provides information to Google to gather the data it needs to report on. You can view the API on Google's code website. http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi.html
A look at the Data
So what kind of data does Google Analytics provide. Here is an overview picture of vacationtours.com.
The first page is an overview of your website statistics. You are able to select a date range you want to drill down on. A nice graph provides trend data of visitors. There is an overview of site usage. A visitor overview which has visitor specific data. A cool feature of a map overlay. Lets you drill down to the location where users are coming in from. If users use proxy servers, the location is from the proxy server not the end user. A graph of traffic sources and finally an overview of which page the user selected. Note for this to work, the analytics code must be on that page.
Now you see the benefit of using Analytics. The question is, how are people getting to your site now? I'll show you more in later posts. For right now, sign up and start looking at the data.
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