Web Analytics Usability Testing Software » google analytics

Google Analytics Tutorial: Getting The Best Out Of Your Web Site

Nick Kurentz — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:36:25 +0000

Businesses are all about decisions, and informed decisions are the thin line of difference between success and confusion. This concept goes for the Internet and websites too, and any tool that provides you with information about your website is a Godsend. Analytics engine is one such simple to use and free tool that gives you web statistics. Here is a short tutorial that will help you harness the true potential of Google.

Step 1 # 1: Making an Account

Analytics software system is a free tool provided by Google. Making an account is convenient and simple. All you need to make a Analytics engine account is a Gmail e-mail id. Once your Gmail e-mail id is set up, you can go to the Analytics engine website and sign up your website for Google Analytics.

Step # 2: Installing the Tracking Code

Once you have signed into Analytics engine, you will be redirected to a page which has links to the analytics reports of your website. If you have not installed the tracking code on your websites, click on the Add Website Profile link.

If this is your first time on Analytics engine, and you have not installed the tracking code on your website or any of its pages, choose the “Add a profile for a new domain” option. Once that is done, scroll down and type in the URL of the home page that you wish to install the tracker to.

Select the time zone you are in and click Continue. Once this is done, the Analytics engine will automatically detect whether the tracking code has been installed on the website or page that you provided them with. Choose any of the code given below (best way is to press Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C) and paste the copied code into the website and webpage that you would want Analytics engine to analyze.

Make sure that you install the code anywhere before the End Body (/body) tag. Click Continue. The pa
ge will now show the webpage, website or websites that you have installed the tracker code to. Click on the View Reports link to go to the The System Dashboard.

Step 3 # 3: The Dashboard

The Dashboard is your Google homepage. Through this page, you can access almost any information you would require about your website, or even any page within the website. Once you have signed into the The System website, you will be redirected to the list of website profiles, that is, the analytics reports of any and all websites that you have installed the Google Analytics tracker code.

Once you are on the Dashboard, you can view the following analytics about your website:

Site Usage: The site usage column gives you the relevant information about the traffic for your website. The Visits column tells you the number of visits and unique visits in a given time frame. You can also know about the number of page views per visit at the Dashboard.

You can also find out the Bounce rate of your website or webpage. Bounce rate is the number of visitors to your websites who browsed away from your website directly from the landing page or the home page. Analytics engine also tells you the exact amount of time one particular user has spent on your website. It can also calculate the percentage of new and unique visits on your website.

Traffic Sources Section: The Traffic Sources Section tells you more about the traffic of your website, and explains it further. You can get information about all the traffic sources for your website. You can also divide your traffic from direct traffic, Search Engine traffic and Referring sites. Google Analytics can also give you traffic related information regarding your AdSense account if you have one.

5 Promising Free (or Nearly Free) Web Analytics Tools

Nick Kurentz — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:19:22 +0000

ListFormula.com If you’re an Internet marketer, you need to test everything you do, and the way to find out whether your squeeze pages, sales letters, and blogs are working is by tracking. This usually involves putting a snippet of code onto your page so that the tracking system can follow its process. It’s rarely difficult, if you know anything at all about HTML, but testing and tracking for lead generation and sales are definitely two activities you cannot afford to overlook. http There …

Comment utiliser le service de Google analytics, pour vérifier les statistiques de son blog

Nick Kurentz — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:06:26 +0000

Vidéo tutorielle pour savoir utiliser le service de Google analytics, afin de vérifier les statistiques de son blog ou de son site. Présentation offerte par: www.code-du-succes.com

The Google Analytics Beta: Improving Profits through Web Site Analytics

Nick Kurentz — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:36:10 +0000

Web site analytics, for those who might not be familiar with the term, is the tracking of various performance metrics for a given web site. The metrics themselves can range from the simple (and relatively useless) count of “hits”, i.e. requests for a given resource such as a single web page, image file, etc., to the measure of far more complex interactions. These complicated interactions can be totally arbitrary; for example, you might want to know the number of orders from visitors who came from a search engine and scrolled at least halfway down a long sales page.
That assumes, of course, that you can figure out how to configure all that tracking, interpret the results and afford the monthly fees for the providers of the service. The cost issue is apparently solved: Google Analytics (http://google.com/analytics) is currently free in its beta version, and early indications are that it will remain so. However, a word of caution is in order: The Terms of Service referenced on the Google Analytics home page seems to indicate that Google can and will make use of your site’s data, at least in aggregate form (that is, mixed in with everybody else).
In many minds Google is starting to become a Big Brother-like presence on the web, hence its motives are suspect pretty much by definition. Personally, I consider my site’s aggregate data a fair trade for the value I will extract from their software, but you will have to make up your own mind. If you’re not bothered by Google knowing as much about your web site as you do, then Google Analytics looks very promising. It is a smart, easy-to-use implementation that hits the sweet spot of web analytics.
The Sweet Spot: Easy Yet Powerful
The sweet spot I’m referring to is really the point where most of us live. We don’t have the technical know-how to configure the most complicated tracking scenarios and even if we could, we don’t have the analytical savvy to make any sense of the data. Google has found the sweet spot by making tracking configuration quite easy, and providing pre-cooked role-based reports that provide lots of information you may not have even realized was readily available. In short, you can get an awful lot of strategic data for very little effort.
Configuration
Let’s walk through setting up a simple and common scenario: We want to know how well our sales letter is converting web site visitors to customers. Where Google Analytics shines is how much valuable data it automatically gleans from just such a simple test.
Google calls a tracking scenario a “profile”. Although you can include URLs from many web sites in a single profile, it is easiest if you organize things such that a profile is fundamentally the same as a web site.
As part of setting up your profile, you provide the URLs of all the pages for which you want data. Google then provides you with a JavaScript snippet to include on each page. The snippet is self-contained and requires no editing. It contains a Javascript include and the following line:
urchinTracker();
It really couldn’t be easier.
You can put the snippet anywhere inside the body tags of your web pages.
Next, you want to specify a “goal”. The goal in our case is sales; we know that the goal has been achieved when the customer reaches our thank you page. Therefore the URL associated with the goal is that of our thank you page. More sophisticated goals can involve defining a “funnel” of multiple pages; this can be extraordinarily useful in identifying a weak spot in a more complicated sales process.
At this point our setup is finished! You then need to just let your site run and accumulate statistics for at least 24 hours.
Reports
When you return and select View Reports, you will see an amazing array of statistics at your disposal. The first thing you’ll notice is a pop-down menu with several roles, namely Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster. Each role has a suite of pre-cooked reports likely to be of interest to someone in that role.
We’ll focus on the Marketer role; when you choose this option you’ll see the Marketing Overview by default. It includes four charts:
1. A line graph showing raw page views over time
2. A pie chart showing the proportion of returning versus new visitors
3. A world map showing the geographic distribution of visitors
4. A pie chart showing the visitor counts based on the referrer, i.e. Google, Blogger.com (for my blog), etc.
The Marketing Summary report is a numerical chart that shows the top five referrers, the top five keywords used by searchers, and the top five campaigns. A campaign is indicated by a code that you attach to a URL. Even so, by default you get several campaign totals. These default campaigns are:
Organic: Indicates visitors referred by an unpaid search engine listing.
Referral: Indicates visitors referred by links which were not tagged with any campaign variables.
Not set: Indicates visitors referred by links which were tagged with campaign variables but for which the campaign variable was not set.
Direct: Indicates visitors who typed the URL directly into the browser.
The next report of interest is Overall Keyword Conversion. Since we have indicated a goal of “sales” and linked it to our thank you page, the Overall Keyword Conversion report is able to tell you which search engine keywords result in the most sales. This is a really useful and potentially profitable report.
The Campaign Conversion report shows which campaigns are creating the most sales, the Conversion Summary produces total visits and total goal percentages.
Finally, the Entrance Bounce Rate is an interesting report that also has valuable data, even in our simple scenario: It provides the list of pages for which customers land and then leave right away. For some pages, our product download page for example, we expect a 100% bounce rate. For others it can illustrate a weak or problematic page.
Google Analytics provides an astonishing amount of data for very little effort—and no cost (so far, anyway). Although there a few advanced reports missing from its arsenal, it makes the bulk of the web site measurement you’ll want to do very easy indeed.

“google Tips That Every Entrepreneur Should Know”

Nick Kurentz — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:57:43 +0000

Google is a powerful search engine and has a stronghold on the Internet market. Therefore, many Internet business entrepreneurs look to Google for help in promoting their Internet business. Google has several features that can be used to your advantage including a Google AdWords Campaign and increasing your placement in the Google search engine results.

Web Analytics Imperfections and Differences

Nick Kurentz — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:57:38 +0000

Clients often come to us and ask why the data that they’re getting from Google Analytics and other javascript based analytics information differ from data that there web hosting service provides. What we explain to them is that roughly 10-15% of web surfers have javascript disabled, resulting in roughly 10-15% less traffic than what your web hosting provider might say. What they also need to come to understand is that web analytics has two competing fields: log files, and javascript. Log files were used in the early days of the field, and relied upon log files that every web server has. The log files record every human or robot that comes to your website, which inflates numbers in reality. Javascript based web analytics, like what Google Analytics runs on doesn’t record robots or spiders as they’re sometimes called, resulting in lower traffic counts than log file analysis would show. Javascript based solutions rely upon servers that collect the information from sites that they’re monitoring, so if they go down, or slow some of your data can be lost. Log file analysis has trouble showing paths that users take through a site, and distinguishing between real peopple, and robots is often difficult. There is no 100% accurate way of knowing everything about every possible user who comes to your website, but you can get a very detailed picture for the vast majority. Keep in mind that web analytics is a tool that should be used to enhance your business, not dictate the precise way you should run it. If you have any further questions that we haven’t clearly addressed, or just need some advise feel free to email us at info@sonicko.com

What is the Google Analytics API?

Nick Kurentz — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:55:50 +0000

Ever wonder what is the Google Analytics API? Listen to Jacob Matthews, the tech lead behind the API, present a high level overview.

30DC Day 07 – Tracking With Google Analytics

Nick Kurentz — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:56:08 +0000

www.thirtydaychallenge.com GuruBob shows you how to setup tracking With Google Analytics. Find out more about the it here: www.thirtydaychallenge.com

How to Setup Google Analytics

Nick Kurentz — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:44:25 +0000

www.thirtydaychallenge.com Learn how to use the Google Analytics we analyzer for web tracking: www.thirtydaychallenge.com