Understand Your Website By Using Google Analytics

Congratulations!  You've just launched a redesign of your website.  Everyone loves it and you're getting rave reviews on the look and feel.  Then a month or two goes by when your boss comes over and says,

"Why aren't we getting any conversions?"
"Are we getting any traffic?"
"Where are users going on the site?"
"How can we improve the site?"

And your answer can either be, 'well let me look' or 'I don't know.'  If you're saying "I don't know" then it may be time to take 20 minutes out of your day and install Google Analytics. Start managing the website and increase its value. The point of the website is to share information or increase leads and sales.  Can you honestly say without analytics what you're users are doing on your site?  It's time to understand consumers and target them, market the company, optimize their values. The website needs a program that gives great insight on both traffic and marketing effectiveness. Google Analytics is a very useful and flexible program that provides multiple features to see and analyze traffic coming to the website.  Wondering why tracking traffic of the site is so beneficial? Well, if the traffic is analyzed correctly, you'll have a better understanding of how to write targeted ads to consumers, become more effective with marketing strategies and optimize the website for conversions. There are so many values Google Analytics offers to websites.

Here's a breakdown of its functions:

Setting up Goals: Set goals according to the expectations of the website and Google Analytics will track the sales and conversions. This measures the site engagement and adds more insight on how strategic and valuable each of the goals were. Once the goals are set its time to filter out each channel or source of traffic to define which source drives the conversions and which ones do not.  On top of that, start determining valuable and non-valuable pages so traffic can be driven to the right locations.  Goal tracking is more than just value tracking, it helps define next steps for analyzing and optimizing online initiatives.

Mobile Tracking: With social media on the rise, it is very important to cater to the mobile consumer. With the majority of Internet activity coming from mobile devices, it's vital to be able to track when the website is being viewed by a mobile user. Google Analytics has the abilities to track web-enabled phones, mobile websites and mobile applications. This proves to be a great feature given that US mobile Internet users is predicted to be 134.3 Million by 2013 which is 55% of the American adult population and downloads of mobile apps will bring in $32 Billion a year by 2015.

Mobile Tracking in Google Analytics

High Intelligence: Don't have time to actually sit and monitor the activity of the website? Google Analytics will provide that task for you. It monitors the website reports and informs of any significant changes to the site, for instance, if the website was high in traffic this week or had no traffic at all, alerts can be sent out to your inbox.  Then look back on the analytic report to decipher the cause of the change.  When adding content to the site or blog, it's always hard to know when search engines will pick up one of your stories and send traffic your way unexpectedly.  Know what's happening as it happens.

Custom Fitting: Customize how you want to view data, reports, and API. Google Analytics provides this feature to fit your needs and wants comfortably. Send out reports on your schedule via email as a csv or pdf.  Schedule them daily, weekly or monthly.  Choose which reports are valuable and create an entire dashboard for quick viewing.

Advanced Segmentation: If one big chunk of information is too much to process at once, break down all the data into segments. The feature helps isolate and analyze subsets of the traffic generated from the site. It's user-friendly and fast and provides an easier and more organized way to view all the data being sent to you. A few examples of advanced segment filters are to track only traffic from social media or users from defined geographical locations.

E-commerce Tracking: This feature helps to understand and trace transactions made through the website. It provides logistics behind the campaigns and keywords used on the site to determine the traffic they generated and the possible revenue accumulated from that. It also measures consumer loyalty and response back from the services the site provides.

Data Export API: Use Google Analytics to integrate business information. This is where you have the ability to develop applications and tools that can access the Analytics program to produce organized data. Create a custom dashboard built to your design needs utilizing all the data files Google Analytics is pulling from your site.

View data the way you want to!

Advanced Analysis Tools: Having the ability to perform advanced date analysis with filtering and at multiple dimensions saves on the time spent searching for information as well as testing it. With this feature not only does it provide more time to sift through documents but it helps discover new trends insights with motion chart visuals. When developing a website one must make sure all features are functional and presented well to the consumer. Say for instance an app is developed for a website, the performance should be one of the best features to the app. Using advanced analysis tools to test the app prior to coding it into the site, one will have the chance to first hand test the feature. These tools also help with the process of writing code as well as go deeper into the report tables and manipulate information to your liking.

Make your website accountable for its actions. Creating or redesigning a website is a long, laborious and financially taxing project for a company to undertake. Without some sort of analytics users make changes to the website blindly without any track-able re-precautions.  The new site will be valuable, but the continual optimization can prove to be much more valuable.  Monitor the traffic and website activity to understand how to better market the company using Google Analytics.  It may be the best 20 minutes of work produced this year.