Google Analytics is a free service used by millions of people word-wide. Many of the clients I’ve worked with make use of it, both large and small businesses. It’s easy to set up, easy to use and provides really valuable information.
But what the heck is it?
Google Analytics is a tool for measuring your site visitors. You can find out how many visitors you have, unique visitors, pageviews, plus what browser, operating system and screen resolution they make us of. All of this is presented in nice-looking graphs, that you can customize to your hearts content. Google Analytics is, quite simply, one of the best web analytic services I’ve ever used, and here is my top 6 reasons why you should use it!
6 fabulous reasons to use Google Analytics
Oh yes, here it is. And here we go:
- Keep track of visitors. Yes, I’m being captain obvious here, but unless you’re running a blog with a comment system, you have no way of knowing if you have any visitors at ALL if you don’t use a system like this.
- Watch your site growth over time. Google Analytics provides awesome customability to your graphs so you can compare different time periods and other stuff.
- Find out just where your visitors come from! This is an awesome feature – does your traffic come from search enginge’s, backlinks or simply by writing the URL in the address field?
- Track down your most popular page. Because everybody wants to get to know the popular kid, right? Then you can learn what makes him cool, and try to apply that same coolness on your other pages.
- It will help you make those design decisions. Tracking your users choice of browser and screen resolution will prove invaluable when you have to make design adjustments to your site.
- It’s all free! Can you think of any better reason? I can’t!
How to set it up
Now, let’s talk about a little how to set it up. First of all, you need a Google account. You may already have one, a simple Gmail address will suffice. If you don’t have that, just surf over to www.google.com/analytics and get yourself an account.
Once you’re in, you need to set up a profile. You usually have one profile per website. You can actually have several websites connected to one Analytics-account, which is really nice.
Anyway, click on “Add Profile” and then choose to add a profile for a new domain.
After filling out your website’s address and time zone, you’re then given the JavaScript code that is to be pasted into every one of your pages. Just remember, it’s REALLY important that you:
- Do not make any alterations to the code. If you want to tab out the code so it looks nice and clean, just be careful!
- Be sure to put the code just below the closing <body> tag. The reason for this is that it allows the entire page to load uninterrupted before Google starts analysing the visitor. However, I never had any problem with the code slowing the my websites.
So now you’ve installed the code, now what? Now…you wait for 24 hours, to give Google time to start tracking your code. If you’re just as inpatient as me, that’s a pain in the ass. 
After those 24 hours, you are ready to go! You can start right away to track your visitors. Take your time to click around the different sections. And please notice that all the graphs you see can be customized.
Analyze away!
The main reason that we use Google Analytics is to get insights on what’s happening to our website and to ACT on it.
For example, how can we use Google Analytics to improve our PPC campaigns? How can we use GA to improve our SEO initiatives? We first form the objective of our websites and then utilise Google Analytics to get insights on how we can best achieve our objectives.
My 2 pence!
Very true. Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for serious blogs and websites. And it’s up to the webmaster how he wants to use the tool.