Google Analytics is a neat little tool. I didn't realise how much information could be gathered about your visitors - for free, and organised so legibly; any type of user can understand it. You need to have a Google account to use it, obviously, but then you can register as many sites as you like, and simply copy and paste the analytics code into the head tag of your website.
If you have a website, you are probably curious about how many visitors you get a day. But, you may not realise how easily available all other sorts of information are. These data not only ease your curiosity; by revealing your (potential) customer's demographics, behaviour and technology used, you acquire valuable data that you can use to help your business.
When viewing the statistics, you can choose any specific date or a range of dates. In the Audience Overview you are shown the number of visits for the day(s) selected, as well as unique visitors. The total number of visits represents the number of sessions (a session is considered over when either a break of more than 30 minutes occurs between visiting your site, or the web browser is closed), whilst the unique visitors represents how many visitors with unique cookies visited your site. If a user clears their browser cache and then revisits your site, or visits from a different browser, then they will be counted as another visitor.
The image to the left illustrates a portion of the Overview view of a website for the month of May. As you can see, 526 sessions viewed the site, and 242 of those 526 were generated by unique cookies. You are also shown how many pages were viewed and the average number of pages viewed per visit. The bounce rate, at 47.34%, represents the percentage of visitors who viewed more than the 1 page they landed on. If, for instance, your site had 10 visits for a period of time, all of whom left your site without viewing another page, your bounce rate would be 100%. Therefore, a lower bounce rate is better, as that means your visitors are actually delving into your site, and not just bouncing away.
** It should be noted, depending on which page, and how many pages, you have included the Analytics Javascript on will affect your visit and visitor statistics.
The Traffic Sources Overview tab offers information on where your traffic is coming from, with details on which keywords were searched and what sites generated traffic.
Or maybe you are interested in where your visitor's are viewing your site from? You can view an Audience Overview by country or city, as well. Perhaps it is useful for you to see which country you get the most unique visitors from... or which one has the highest bounce rate.
Or do you wanna know what browsers your visitors are using, along with their version? That information is available, too. As are statistics for visit durations, and how many page views those visits generated... as shown in the screenshot to the right.
The Content Overview tab allows you to see statistics from the individual pages of your site, such as how many page views each one has gotten during a specific day or range of days. of course, all these data can be analysed further by clicking on it and adding a dimension to the analysis. In the example below, we are looking at the statistics for the page contact.php. It had 51 page views in May, 28 of which were from unique cookies. The average time spent on the page was 39 seconds, and 12% of visitors exited the site from this page. Upon adding the source of traffic into the analysis, we can see that 20 out of the 28 unique visitors were from direct traffic, whilst 6 came from facebook, 1 from chapeaurouge.cz and 1 from a google search.
The data which is most useful for you depends on the kind of business you have, but regardless of what it is you're selling, promoting or sharing - you will surely be able to extract useful information from the data which Google Analytics gathers for you. The ways of organising the data are seemingly endless.
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