Get Started with Google Analytics (Part 2)
Author of this post: Karen Morrill-McClure | About Blog Authors »
In Part 1 of this post, I extolled the virtues of Google Analytics and walked you through the set-up process. Today, I’ll show you how to view some simple statistics.
Viewing Your Data
Since you’ve already copied Google’s code to your pages, you’re ready to start tracking your sites. Go to the Google Analytics home page, and make sure that it’s receiving data from all your sites. That way you’ll know that Google Analytics is getting the information it needs.
Once the data is flowing, view the reports for any site, and you’ll see the relevant data. Google doesn’t just dump a bunch of numbers into a web page. Instead, it presents the information in graphs and even maps, so it’s very easy to understand.
The default dashboard is a great place to start. It graphs your traffic over time and tells you how long visitors are staying on your site. The default dashboard also shows you where your visitors are coming from, and what pages are most popular.
Google has a great help center, so if you have a question (for example, what is a bounce rate?), go ahead and click on the Help link in the upper right-hand corner. Google will define the term: “The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits.”, and also indicate what it may mean for your site: “Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality, and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” The search is excellent (what else would you expect from Google?), so go ahead and use it, too.
You can actually learn a lot about web analytics from the Google Analytics Help Center.
A Final Tip
If your clients have Google accounts, you can provide them access to the reports relevant to their sites.
Click on the Access Manager at the bottom of the Google Analytics home page. Then, click the Add User button and enter your client’s Google account information. Finally, select the sites that you wish to make available.
All in all, Google Analytics is an immensely useful service, and it can do great things for your sites.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:14 am
There is no doubt that Google Analytics is a powerful and sophisticated tool that gives you an edge of better understanding about various statistics of your website. But some critics raise the question that Google Analytics deals with a lot of business critical data, and it might arises the question of privacy concerns of enterprises. Some are of this opinion that while this will not be a case of misuse of privacy from a company of stature like Google, still it can use in some form or the other to further their business interests.
But still one can say that Google Analytics provide up to date information about website statistics to strongly improve the respective website’s performance.
October 27th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
another nice tutorial , thanks .
October 29th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
good thing to able clients to see stats.
November 27th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Hey analytics is the best option to other paid tools, i have used analytics since long and getting great result for the same.
thanks for sharing