Google Analytics (I)
- Basic Analysis -

What is Google Analytics?

An online business it's not so different from a brick-and-mortar business; it also needs good planning, careful management and progress monitoring. The goals of web traffic analysis is to monitor the website's progress, to figure out how well or how poorly your site is doing and to provide relevant data to support decisions and changes in how the website is managed.

In a previous article, cPanel - Traffic Analysis, we have defined the terms used in web traffic monitoring and described some of cPanel's basic tools and how we can interpret the data obtained. Google Analytics (GA) is also a traffic analysis tool. It works by adding a piece of JavaScript code to your web pages and it is available for free here. It provides more relevant data than cPanel's tools therefore we can obtain better information about our visitors. We will not go into much detail of how you install GA; basically you sign up for a GA account with Google and you add your website(s). The program will generate a custom JavaScript code that needs to be copied on the web pages that you want to monitor.

Compared with cPanel, GA only cares about human visitors and doesn't record robots activity, so for GA visits and visitors refer to the same thing: human beings. However, visits number is greater then visitors' because a visitor returning in a selected time period (i.e. 30 min) is recorded as an additional visit, but not as an additional visitor.

Beside files, page views and visits, GA is able to actually track what visitors are doing on your website thus new traffic measuring metrics are available: the number of pages/visit, average time spent on website/webpage, % of new visits and bounce rates. Pages/visit, as the name suggests, represent the average number of pages that a visitor browsed during his visit. By using cookies, GA can also tell the time a visitor spendt on a webpage/website and how many are new visitors and how many are returning visitors - % of new visits. Another important metric for basic traffic analysis is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that left your site from the entrance (landing) page; they just came and "bounced" back without visiting other pages. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site's entrance pages need more attention because it seems that they aren't relevant to your visitors, they do not entice the visitors to want to see more.

The GA panel has left menu navigation and it uses the rest of the screen to display the graphs, charts and data specific to each section from the menu. There are four main sections available: Visitors, Traffic, Content and Goals and a Dashboard which is the summary of the data from the four main sections. The time range for the data displayed is user customizable. The default range is 1 month (the last month) but it can be changed from the time menu in the upper right corner.

The Dashboard

The default panel when you open GA is the Dashboard. The purpose of the dashboard is to provide a brief overview of the website's traffic data. It is customizable - each option from the left menu can be added to the dashboard (it has in the upper left corner an Add to Dashboard button). The "factory default settings" show a nice graph of the visitors, general site usage traffic metrics, traffic sources and content overviews and a map overlay.

Visitors

It's the section with technical and behavioural data about your visitors. Technical data such as: Languages, country of origin (Map Overlay), Browser Properties and Network and Connection Properties and behavioural data (in the Visitor Loyalty subsection) such as:

• Loyalty - or in other words how many times people are visiting the website. Are they coming back or it's just a one time visit and that's all?
• The Length of Visit - it's the detailed data used to calculate the average time on site. Check to see if you have a high average time because of a few very high numbers or is it because the bulk of the visits have times close to that average.
• The Depth of Visit - shows the number of pages browsed in each visit. It's a good metric to use when evaluating how interesting is the website overall. Usually the higher the number, the better.

Sources of Traffic

There are three possible sources for your website's traffic:

1. The search engines - traffic coming from searches made on search engines;
2. Referring links - people coming through links on other web sites;
3. Direct traffic - people typing the name of the website directly into the browser.

With the traffic menu you have a good breakdown of the traffic sources.

Analyzing the traffic sources is crucial to assess the success or failure of your web marketing and SEO efforts. If you are running advertising campaigns on other websites or if you have improved your website to rank on the first page of search engine results pages (SERP), this is the section that you want to check first. The Referring Sites and Search Engines sub-sections display a detailed list of the referring links and search engines traffic.

Keywords list provides additional data for organic searches and/or PPC campaigns analysis. Besides the name of the search engine, you can actually see and count the keywords and key phrases used by the visitors to get to your website. Because people usually look for search results in the first 2-3 pages of the SERP, the keywords listed in this section are a good measure of the keywords that you rank first or in the top first results in the SERP.

Content

The content section is about visitors' navigation; check the Top Landing Pages, the Top Exit Pages and the Content Drilldown of all the website's pages (assuming you put the tracking code in all web pages). You can see the number of times each page was displayed, the time spent on page and which pages are the entrance and exit "doors" of your website.

If you have the Google Search Javascript implemented as your website search option, the Site Search sub-section section provides some statistical data on the searches made with that search tool.

Goals

A goal is a webpage which a visitor reaches only after a desired action is performed such as a thank you page for a sale or a download. It's the final URL of a series of navigational steps. To define a goal you need to go to Analytics Settings and click on the Edit option for the website. You can define up to 4 goals. If the "conversion process" takes more than 1 page, you can define funnel navigation of up to 10 pages leading to the goal URL. But more about Goals in the next article: Advanced Analysis.