In my last post, I mentioned five simple ways to use Google Analytics to get to know your website better.
I am no expert in Google Analytics, but there are people who are. If you want to get a better and more in-depth understanding of Google Analytics, or even get answers to specific questions you have, here are some free resources I can suggest:
- ABC of Google Analytics – A free eBook all about Google Analytics by Althaf Ahmed
- Google Analytics Interface Tutorial – Google’s tutorial video on YouTube
- Google Analytics Tutorials at Conversation Marketing – The first of a series of 5-minute video tutorials on the subject of Google Analytics (to find this blogger’s other videos and posts on this subject I suggest you visit his Analytics Category page.
- The Google Analytics Blog – This blog published by Google and is entirely dedicated to the subject of Google Analytics.
I haven’t had a chance to go through these materials in full. We all have to balance our time spent on productivity with the time we spend on education and analysis. But all are important. I hope these resources are useful to you. I plan to study them over time and utilize Google Analytics more and more with my websites, blogs, and marketing campaigns.
Even the information I have already found just by browsing through Google Analytics here and there has been extremely useful for me and has helped me plan my next steps for my websites, as well as helping me plan my time and schedule. Analytics gives me clues on what to work on next and what my priorities will be. I think I will find myself using it more and more as time goes on.
I hope these resources are useful to you. Don’t feel like you have to study everything at once! This is just one of many Internet Marketing tools for you to learn, practice, and apply, as part of your overall strategy toward long-term success.
This is awesome. It was pretty easy to get going. It seems like google analytics is unable to produce one type of result that I want though. For a single page on my site I want to know the keywords that got people there or the referrers. I can browse to it on the web interface, but I keep getting bad request errors when I try a way to get that info from them.
I’ve tried adding pagePath and keyword as dimensions and I’ve tried using a filter on pagePath while only having keyword as a dimension. Neither of those would work. Do you have any other ideas I could try?
Know more about our website would do more help and i say, a must, if one owns a site or a blog. I will check out this one. Many thanks!
The best feature of Analytics is the goal conversion for me. With the data I gathered for one website I was able to take it from 22.00 bucks a day to an average of 87.00 in just 4 weeks.
@Stacy – “For a single page on my site I want to know the keywords that got people there or the referrers.”
Not sure why you are getting errors. Maybe you could try it again. I hope the links to free reference materials above can help you as well. Its definitely worthwhile to understand this tool better!
@daniel – That’s a great success! I think this little tool can be very powerful! Thanks for your comment and for letting us know how the results you got.
Thanks for this information – I already use google analytics but this will advance my knowledge, however my main problem is my website bounce rate and I don’t know how to reduce it – any help appreciated!
Thanks for passing this on!
Google Analytics is a great tool, but too bad it updates only once per 24 hours.
In my opinion, you have done good work, I really appreciate it, keep it up. & I’m very grateful for the link.
Its great to know abt Anna and her work. I can say she is far more talented than we SEOs atleast. I am sure she is able to balance time for all beautiful things she likes doing.
Abt Google Analytics yes I must say its a pretty good tool for free atleast, I can really see which keywords I should focus on and which not, even though the keyword research has showm some figure but in reality those high traffic keywords don’t convert, so its pretty useful to get those tips. Thanks for the resources Anna, i will definitely find time to read them.
Kala
Good call on the Bounce rate, this statistic does not get enough exposure. I use this stat to measure immediate success of the site. In fact, measuring bounce rate and time on site is much more informative than visits. Good Job!
.-= Tony Nestor´s last blog ..FTP is unsecure, clear text–Firewall is a priority =-.
@Max – you are right, sometimes I wish it updated more often. But despite that, it is one of the best tracking and analysis features there is, and it is free. In the future I wonder if it will change the speed of its updates.
@Tony – thanks
I agree with you. It is far too underrated. After all, what good is it to have 1000 visitors a day, if 600 of them leave in under 5 seconds? I would rather have 500 visitors per day with 401 staying for more than 5 seconds 
I suspect bounce rate would be a factor influencing your rankings in search engines as well. If I were a search engine, I would definitely use this to measure the quality of a site.
I have been working on improving bounce rates a lot more lately and I will be writing a post with more about this at some point … hopefully soon
@Iphone Battery Life Thank you for your visit, feedback, and compliments
You are right, using Google Analytics to find out which keywords convert, and focusing on those that do, is another great idea.
If your site is monetized primarily by Adsense, you can also integrate Analytics with Adsense to find out which pages and types of pages get the highest revenue, and focus on both a) creating more of those pages and b) driving more traffic to those pages. This is an excellent tool, and allows you to see the Adsense earnings and stats for individual pages of your site, without having to create a new Adsense channel for each page.
Analytics has been the most important part of me being a webmaster. Sometimes i seem to spend more time on analytics than on my website, for a person having enough knowledge to carry out and analysis based on traffic reports and make plans and goals, analytics can be much more than a companion.
.-= Techfrog´s last blog ..Blogs or Articles – Which one do search engines prefer? =-.
@Techfrog – I agree. Analytics and web stats are key – I don’t know what I would do without them. But it would definitely feel like flying in the dark.
It’s time that I start engaging with Google Webmaster tools and Analytics more so I can track the traffic and some other things.
But analytics for bloggers is very important since you can track down traffic from various places like blog directories and other sites where we get our blogs listed. So it would be great to find out where our efforts are going and what we need to do more. For business sites, I am not quite sure whether analytics really works or not however it’s good to track down traffic but I think most of their traffic comes from search engines so Google already knows about it, but would love to know about it from any good webmaster who uses it regularly.
Just my two cents.
Regards
Jerry Clifford
Thanks for the valuable feedback. I really like the idea of using analytical for my sites. I have used it to know how many Unique visitor sees my sites. Very helpful article.
I’m using Analytics and Webmaster Tools for all my sites. The first thing I do once I setup a site is add it to the Webmaster tools, verify the site and then submit the sitemap (if you have a blog, you can do that with one of the plugins, but most of my sites are regular html). Then I add it to Analytics and start tracking it. I love it when I start to see traffic coming in…
.-= Joannah@tv mounting brackets´s last blog ..Flat Panel TV Mounts =-.
The great thing is that once you put the code in the site, Google Analytics is collecting the data, even if you don’t have the chance to get to it right away. It’s all there.
Actually I’ve sort of stopped using Analytics since I have the expanded version of the Google webmaster tools. They have so many things inbuilt in this newer version that I just can’t see the need to head over to analytics. I can get the impressions per day,the actual keywords that people are searching for and so much more. I’m wondering if Google improved their Webmaster Tools that much so they eventually stop with Analytics altogether…
Well, I’m still using Analytics if for nothing else but it’s darn useful when you want to sell your site at Flippa.com. It’s amazing how much people rely on Analytics and how much they’re willing to pay for your site if you have that in place. Awstats just doesn’t work as well here, I’m afraid.
Analytics is key for me. Let’s me see entry and exit points much easier, and has increased my ROI.
Everyone should use analytics. inkasso
I’m using Analytics and Webmaster Tools for all my sites. The first thing I do once I setup a site is add it to the Webmaster tools, verify the site and then submit the sitemap (if you have a blog, you can do that with one of the plugins, but most of my sites are regular html). Then I add it to Analytics and start tracking it. I love it when I start to see traffic coming in…
.-= Joannah@tv mounting brackets´s last blog
Forex Programming
I don’t use Google Analytics on my site because I have read somewhere that it is not good because Google will have all the information about your site. This is especially true if you are doing internet marketing and may not want to let Google know what you are doing on your site.
Dear Reverse Osmosis Water Filter,
I understand that concern – if you are using methods which Google might object to, then yes that could be a problem. Simply “doing internet marketing” as you state in your comment is not something that Google will object do. As long as you are using honest techniques and you are in compliance with Google’s webmaster guidelines, you should really not have much to worry about.