Why Use Google Analytics
TweetIf you are a site owner then you should have some form of analytics installed on your site. This will allow you to track your user's data and make informed decisions about how to operate your site. Let's take a look at a few reasons that I use analytics with my Internet business:
Spotting Problems - Setting up analytics will allow you to easily spot bugs, mistakes, and oversights. The sooner you spot them, the quicker they are fixed and you are back on track.
Managing Campaigns - If you are using any sort of pay-per-click (PPC) then analytics is an absolute must, but beyond PPC you also need to monitor organic search for the results you are getting from certain keywords, or any other kind advertising that you are doing.
Spotting Opportunities - If you see trends in your analytics, like an increase in the number of people finding your site by a certain keyword, then you can start to ramp up your link building efforts for that specific anchor text.
Improving Conversions & Testing - What pages are most of your visitors finding first? What are they doing after they land on your site? Is there anything that you can do to drive them to your money pages or get them to sign up for your newsletter? How are you going to know the answers to any of these questions if you aren't tracking visitors?
Hopefully by now you understand just how important it is to have some sort of analytics program on your site, but which one to choose. There are several good providers out there, but Google Analytics is my preferred solution. Here is why:
- Easy integration with Adsense and Adwords: This allows me to track my earnings from Adsense, and also allows me to search which keywords are profitable in my PPC campaigns.
- E-Commerce Integration: I can track my sales back to specific pages, keywords, etc...
- User-Defined Goals: What pages do I want my users to end up at? Easily customizable.
- Reports: Dashboard is configurable and gives me a quick overview of the information I want to see, plus I can export the data in a variety of different methods.
- Users: I can assign different people on my team access to different site profiles.
- Up-Time: Google is tough to overload, so you know there is going to be near 100% uptime.
- Custom Reports: Secondary segmentation and drill-down of the data.
- Mobile Analytics: Tracking the phones and operating systems used.
- Site Search: So I can see just what my users are looking for.
- Event Tracking: Allows me to track clicks on outbound links.
The only real down side to Google Analytics is that the data is not in real-time. It's delayed by a few hours, but I look mostly at long-term reports so this isn't that big of a deal to me. It is easy to install, so I recommend getting signed up today and start using this great service so you can track your visitors and use the data to improve your site performance.