Google helps you track website traffic
Posted 29 May 2007 at 9:19AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website
Google has just launched a new interface for its excellent (and free!) Google Analytics website traffic analysis service. I've been a user of the service for some time now, drawn particularly by its unbeatable price tag, but I never really enjoyed using it. Until now.
Website statistics can be compulsive. A website manager has immediate, unrestricted and free-of-charge access to the sort of customer data which other marketing disciplines spend millions on. And if you're not careful, you can find yourself spending huge chunks of your day watching the numbers (hopefully!) tick upwards, slicing and dicing the data to your heart's content. But the truth is in there: your usage data will tell you everything you need to know about how your website is doing, and what you need to do to improve it.
The initial 'dashboard' view of the new Google Analytics interface gives you an instant fix, showing a Flash-based graph of the last month's activity, whether your measure of choice is visits, page views, time spent on the site, or any combination thereof. You can hover over points on the graph to see the exact number; and you can change the timeframe using a clickable calendar or (my personal favourite) a draggable 'timeline'. Beneath are a few key numbers, a couple of further charts, and a list of the most popular pages in your chosen timeframe. But that's only the start of it.
With Google's trademark simplicity disguising the depth and complexity beneath, you can click around countless reports, telling you who your users are, how they found you, what they did when they arrived, even what software and operating system they were using. With a little extra configuration, you can track specific advertising campaigns, e-commerce transactions or any other 'goals' you care to define. Any figures which are of particular interest can be added to your initial dashboard view with a single click. There's also an export button to extract the data for use in a spreadsheet package, or for printing as a PDF. You can even tell it to email you (and anyone else) on a regular basis with the latest numbers from the site. None of this is necessarily groundbreaking: the higher-end web analytics tools have had such tools for some time, but often at a hefty price, and rarely as simple to use.
Activating Google Analytics is remarkably easy. You'll need a Google username, if you don't have one already: then it's simply a case of copying half a dozen lines of javascript from the Google site, and pasting them into your website's page template(s). Come back the next day, and you'll hopefully see the data starting to come in.
Find out more by watching this short video on the Google site; and if this isn't enough to convince you, read this list of 27 features that make Google Analytics best of breed. Users of the older interface had better get used to the new one; it'll be forced upon you in mid-July.
Tags: analytics, google, statistics, traffic analysis, usage
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Comments
2. At May 29, 2007 9:46 PM, Simon wrote:
Kim: it would certainly be extra-cautious to avoid all javascript, purely in the interests of keeping Google happy. There are some things you could do with javascript which might be seen unfavourably, but it definitely isn't a blanket ban on all javascript. Besides, it would be pretty odd for them to encourage websites to use their javascript-based services, then penalise them for doing precisely that!
3. At May 30, 2007 12:46 PM, kim wrote:
thanks for that advice simon
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1. At May 29, 2007 4:06 PM, kim wrote: