Google Analytics is a free tool that enables webmasters to monitor the activity of their site visitors, and the wealth of information it supplies makes it an invaluable resource that no webmaster can afford to be without.
Before any webmaster can take advantage of this great free tool they will need to sign up for a Google Analytics account and insert a snippet of code (provided by Google) into their webpages. It’s easy to do. Anyone who has mastered copying and pasting should be able to do it in just seconds.
Once installed the analytics code allows Google to track the activity on each individual webpage and it will be available to the webmaster every time they log into their Google Analytics account.
A Few Benefits of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is rich in features, some of which only experienced users will be able to fully take advantage of, but even a novice analytics user can still benefit from a wealth of useful information.
This includes:
- How visitors arrived at the site (search engine, social network referral. referral from another site, link in an email, etc.)
- What browser they used, their location (country, city etc.)
- How many pages they viewed and which ones.
The list goes on and on, but here are a couple of examples how this information can be used:
A webmaster in London is an affiliate for Amazon UK, but they are not getting any sales.
Why?
Without some form of analytics they would probably never know, but with Google analytics installed the webmaster may discover . . .
- Nobody is visiting their site. Well that explains why they are making no sales. It also tells the webmaster what they need to do to rectify the situation—drive more traffic to the site.
Or perhaps the data shows . . .
- 10,000 unique visitors a day! But still no commissions from Amazon UK? The webmaster takes a closer look at their stats and discovers all their visitors are from the USA. Bingo! Problem explained. They are promoting the wrong affiliate products and would be more successful as an affiliate for Amazon.com or some other affiliate program that targets customers in the USA.
Those are just two examples of how Google Analytics can be used, but there are many more. Sound good? It’s all that and a whole lot more. If you own a site you need it. Get it here.
