Google Analytics How-to

Hello Analytics Peoples!

I’m terribly sorry that you haven’t heard from me in a couple of weeks.  I’ve been moving, and it’s throwing the whole world into chaos.  There’s good news though…the move is finished, the boxes are unpacked, and the furniture is all (almost) in place.  I can finally think again.

And I can concentrate on Google Analytics, too.  In fact, I had a nice conversation with Tim Bourquin over at SmallBusinessPodcast.com on Wednesday of this week.  Tim’s a great guy, and I enjoyed talking to him.  You can listen to the podcast September 21st.  Actually, Mary and I both spoke with Tim, so there will be two podcasts that go live the same day.

During the conversation with Tim, he and I discussed how you can use the data that Google Analytics collects for you.  It was a fun conversation.  Of course, most of the information in the podcast is covered in the book, too, which you should now be able to find at any local bookstore.  I actually found copies of it at my local Barnes and Noble in Alabama.  If it’s there, I have to assume it’s everywhere.

In the conversation with Tim, we talked about what the most useful feature of  Google Analytics is, and to be honest, I have a hard time just naming one.  There’s so much to learn about your site from the data that Analytics collects.  I think I’ve already told you about learning about a link from years ago that’s still driving traffic to my site.  And in the book, we talk (a lot) about how we discovered that my site is not user friendly because of the program used to design it.

One thing that I haven’t talked to you about is learning where users are leaving my site.  A large majority of users bounce–that is they land on a page and immediately leave the site from that page.  And, as it turns out, that’s due to the whole problem with the site design.  I did, however, learn that users tend to spend more time on the content pages than on the information pages.  That tells me that I could add more content to my site, redesign it in a program that actually supports browsers other than Internet Explorer, and my site would not only have more quality visits, but it would also have visits that last longer.  In other words, I could provide more value to my site visitors, so they would spend more time on the site.

With Google Analytics, there is a little something for everyone.  I don’t sell products on my site, but you might.  And if you do, you can learn all kinds of interesting information about how users travel through your site and ultimately arrive at the decision to complete (or not) a purchase.  That kind of information is simply invaluable.