I’ve just come across an excellent video tutorial from Google, that gives a brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface.
If you are responsible for the success of a website, one of the most valuable endeavors you can engage in is understanding your website analytics. What may surprise you is the fact that you don’t have to be a Web analytics guru to do this.
Diving deep into just the key performance indicators (KPI) such as visits, page views, bounce rate, average time on site and the number of new visits to your website, will provide you with important data you can use when making design modifications and creating or changing your website content.
Keep in mind that there is a big difference between website reporting and website analytics. Reporting simply gives you a set of data. Analytics on the other hand, allows you to dig deep and find the major factors affecting your sites performance.
Before you watch the video, it is neccessary to have a basic understanding of a few commonly used analytic terms. Now, I have no idea of how versed you are with analytics. Many of you reading this post may very well be “Web analytics guru’s”. But for the sake of those who may be just getting ther feet wet on this subject, I’ve included a few of the more commonly used terms.
Traffic – tells us how many people came to our website and how many pages they viewed. However, it is a term that consists of many variables. Unique visitors and page views are both variables of traffic.
Unique Visitor – describes a unit of traffic to a website, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report.
Page View – or page impression is a request to load a single page of a website.
Conversion – is an action defined by the completion of an activity. Downloading an ebook, purchasing a product or completing a lead capture form are all examples of conversions.
Conversion Rate – is simply the percentage of visitors that were converted to buyers or took the desired action.
Referral URL – is the webpage our traffic is coming from. Properly analyzing the referral URL can also give us the identity of those sources of traffic that are not converting well.
Google Analytics is very powerful software. It’s web based, so there’s nothing to download and it’s Free to use.
I will be posting more in-depth tutorials as they are released so bookmark this page and come back often.
Subscribe to my RSS Feed
