How to use Google Analytics

The first thing you need to do before you start all that other search engine optimization stuff is, you want to be able to track and analyze your current website traffic. A free and very useful tool provided by Google Analytics does much more than that.

Google Analytics shows you where your website traffic is coming from by country, what key words (very useful) visitors are using to find your website, the average time spent on your website, your top 10 landing pages (first page people view), referring traffic sources and much more. Here is a picture of what your Dashboard will look like;

Google Analytics Example

In order to access the power of Google Analytics all you need is an email address and someone who can input one html code that Google will provide for you. You can even do it yourself it is literally copy and paste. All you need to know where in your html coding to place it. Google suggests to place the code above the </head> tag which can easily be found by clicking ctrl+f and typing in </head>. Just paste the code right above that header tag and you now have successfully installed Google Analytics. Visit Google Analytics to sign up. From their the program will automatically run itself and all you have to do is analyze!

Google Analytics utilizes some cool graphs and features to show you how your website traffic history is progressing.

By clicking on visitors over view, you can track how many visits your website receives per day/week/month and how many unique visits (individual IP address visits).

In the content over view,  you can analyze which web pages on your site are receiving the most traffic and the entrance pathways there. This is beneficial to check because if you have a "squeeze page" which is the sales page that says "CLICK HERE!" or "SIGN UP NOW!" you can see if it is the most frequently viewed page, how visitors are finding the page, and the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage % of visitors that will view one single page of your website then exit. So the lower the bounce rate the more interested people are with your website.

Another great feature of Google Analytics is the traffic sources overview, this page lets you see how much traffic is coming from direct URL entries, search engines, and referring sites.

This helped me market my banks website by finding out which websites refer (backlink) to the banks website and what reviews they wrote about. This shows you more insight on what kind of traffic (hopefully quality) your being sent by other websites.

Detailed view of California Analytics

The last main feature of Google is probably the most interesting one. Click on the map overlay and it will provide you with a map of the world that you can click on to get to what city your visitors are coming from. All you have to do is click on the country, then state/province, and that will bring up little orange dots that will show you the specific city your visitors came from. Cool right (almost scary).

These are the main features of Google Analytics. I highly recommend using this program not only because its free but because big G knows there stuff and provides great information (they are the worlds largest information resource).

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about Google Analytics and I will be happy to assist you. Also if you know of any other note worthy website traffic reports then feel free to suggest them. I learned how to utilize Google Analytics from an Orange County Internet Marketing company called SoCal Digital Marketing click here to check them out!