Google Analytics – A Beginner’s Guide

Our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics is aimed at small businesses that maybe haven’t heard of it or used it before.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free application which allows you to track a whole host of information regarding your website visitors.

In order to set it up you need to place a small piece of code on your own website which is then used to gather all the necessary data.

What information does it provide?

Google Analytics provides a wealth of useful information including;

• How many people have viewed your site over a given period
• How long they’ve spent on your site
• What keywords they used to find your website
• What websites provided traffic to your site
• Where in the world visitors accessed your site from
• What pages on your site received the most visitors

The points listed above are just some of the areas that Google Analytics can supply information on and because it’s completely free to use, it’s a must for any small business with a website.

It’s one thing having access to all this information but it counts for nothing if you aren’t prepared to act on it.

Why is it important?

The information provided by Google Analytics is important because it highlights areas where your website is performing well and more importantly lets you see where it could be improved.

For example, you may be getting a lot of traffic to your homepage but people are only staying for 10 seconds or less and then leaving your site. This would give you a few possible areas to look at as the main cause including;

• How long your homepage takes to load
• The effectiveness of your main headline
• Are poor quality images on your homepage putting people off?

Another area you may want to look at closely is the breakdown of how people arrive on your site. This will usually be a graph showing how many people came directly, how many through the search engines and how many from other referring sites.

If you’ve placed a banner advert on another website for example, then this lets you track exactly how many click throughs you’re getting from that advertising spend.

Taking the time to familiarise yourself with Google Analytics is worthwhile as it helps to eliminate much of the guesswork about how visitors are finding and interacting with your website.

If you liked this article you may also want to read my top 10 Google Analytics tips

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Analytics, Guides for Beginners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.