Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. GA is reportedly the most widely used website statistics service in the world today.
Most online marketers currently use Google Analytics for basic stats to track the performance of their site. In fact, if you’re like most users, you very rarely venture far from the comfort of the reports shown on the dashboard.
Did you know that Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports that will help you analyze all possible data about your website traffic? GA not only tracks visitors to your site or the number of page views, it can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing
campaigns, including Adwords, Adsense and emails and much, much more.
For example ...
* You can identify where visitors leave your site and modify it to prevent losing leads.
* You can identify which pages and links visitors click on most and spend most time on.
* Analytics also tells you which sites users came to your site from.
* You can find out the most popular keywords users type into a search engine to find your site.
* Visitor segmentation by new vs returning users, geography and referral source provides invaluable insight when planning future business.
* Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google Adwords so that you can have almost end-to-end visibility in your search advertising results.
* Analytics allows tracking of other non-search-engine marketing media.
* Analytics will save you money and help you gain more customers
It’s not difficult to access any of these tools, or to create custom reports, and there are free tutorials you can take advantage of at the GA site. Admittedly it may feel a little daunting at first for those still relatively new to the internet, but if you're able to invest the time to go through all the training you can take a test (cost to take the test is $50 USD) to qualify as an expert; which you can then include on your resume and post on your site.
If you’d like to learn the basics, particularly if you’re new to Google Analytics, you can download a free report – Understanding Google Analytics @ http://www.mheraldebooks.com/Google-Analytics-Preview.pdf, or visit my site to download the report and find additional information at http://www.inspiredgiftgiving.com
Marquita lives in Maui, Hawaii and her professional background includes a successful 20 year sales and marketing career as a "road warrior" traveling the world promoting the Hawaii, followed by seven years as award winning coach working with new entrepreneurs building a home based businesses. Currently she is indulging her passion for writing by growing a lifestyle blog and writing a book, while continuing to provide training and support to new entrepreneurs.