Friday, March 2, 2012

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use on around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites. Another market share analysis claims that Google Analytics is used at around 49.95% of the top 1,000,000 websites (as currently ranked by Alexa).

GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.

GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.

If your site sells products or services online, you can use Google Analytics e-commerce reporting to track sales activity and performance. The e-commerce reports show you your site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics.

Users can officially add up to 50 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to one website. It is limited to sites which have a traffic of fewer than 5 million pageviews per month (roughly 2 pageviews per second), unless the site is linked to an AdWords campaign.


We've been listening to your feedback about the new version of Google Analytics, and are excited to release an updated user interface featuring enhancements to nearly all aspects of the design of Google Analytics.

User interface updates
Based on input from our users, partners, and customers, we have launched several improvements to our user interface. We are particularly proud of the attention to detail that our user experience team has put into making the interface easy to use, understandable, and beautiful.

The primary goal of this update is to bring more attention to the things that matter -- your data, and how you analyze it. We improved legibility of score card and table data, and refined our color palette to draw attention toward data instead of navigation elements.

We’ve also made several usability improvements:
• Improved information hierarchy
• Change the graphed metric and select a comparison metric directly from the graph
• Graph and Table options are more visible
• Improved Metric Group selection
• Added icons to left navigation

We would like to thank everyone for submitting excellent feedback. Please continue to provide input on how Google Analytics can best deliver the insights you need.

No comments:

Post a Comment