Analyzing Your Site Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics began its life as another company's premium tool for Web site traffic analysis--at a substantial yearly cost to users. Fortunately for value-minded Webmasters everywhere, Google bought the company and immediately offered the service for free.

(If you're wondering why Google doesn't charge a penny for such a prime product, it's because Google recognizes that many medium-size and big businesses will take advantage of the full package of Google services and use Google Analytics in conjunction with the money-making Google AdWords service, with which it is closely integrated.)

To use Google Analytics, you sign up (creating a free account), and then answer a few simple questions about your Web site. At the end of the sign-up process, you're given a small block of JavaScript code. To enable Google Analytics, you need to copy this code into every page on your site. (If your pages are generated dynamically by a programming platform, you'd paste the JavaScript code into the master template.)

Every time a visitor surfs to a Web page on your site, the JavaScript code will run, and a small parcel of information will be sent to Google's servers. This information consists of the publicly accessible details of any Web request--things like the type of browser that's being used, the features it supports, the language it's configured to use, the IP address of the computer it's connecting through (which Google can use to locate the visitor geographically), and so on. The code also stores a tiny unique cookie on each visitor's computer (similar to the way almost all e-commerce Web sites work) so that Google can distinguish new customers from repeat viewers.

The remarkable part of Google Analytics is that you don't need to understand this process in any detail, and you don't need to worry about storing or analyzing the masses of information that it collects. Instead, Google Analytics provides a host of different reports that you can use to analyze your Web site's traffic. Using these reports, you can discover a wealth of information about your site's traffic, including such key types of data as:

• Where (geographically) your visitors come from
• What browsers they use
• Which pages are most popular, and how long visitors look at different pages
• Which pages are mostly viewed last before a visitor leaves your site
• What Web sites (or search engines) referred your visitors to your site (a great way to compare the value of different paid placements)
• What proportion of your visitors are new
• Which pages are most likely to "bounce" (a bounce occurs when a visitor enters your site at a particular page, and then exits immediately without viewing any other pages)