Analytics, What is Google Analytics? (Video)

In this article I will be answering questions such as, what is web analytics, what are the best web analytics tools and in particular, what is Google analytics?. The aim of this, and following articles, is to enable website owner and internet marketers specifically to improve the targeting of their website content.

•  If you require more than traditional web analytics, try ClickTale. ClickTale‘s analytics service is qualitative and provides a full video playback option for each individual visitor’s session. In addition, it uses meta statistics to create visual heatmaps and behavioural reports, as well as conversion analytics and traditional web statistics. For more information see my ClickTale review.

 

Contents:

• What is Analytics?
• Common Application of Analytics
• What is Web Analytics?
• Google Analytics What is it?
• Top Ways Google Analytics Web Analytics Benefits You
• The Google Analytics Tracking Code
• Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting On Your Data (Video)
• What are the Best Web Analytics Tools
• Analytics, What is Google Analytics Conclusion

 

What is Analytics?

When we ask, what is analytics, I think most of us immediately think of data analysis. Analytics is in fact a two-sided coin.

• On one side, analytics uses descriptive and predictive models to gain valuable knowledge from data analysis.
• On the other side, analytics uses insight to recommend action or guide decision making.

Analytics then, is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.

Common Application of Analytics

The most common application of analytics is to business data. Analytics is used to describe, predict and improve business performance. Since computational analytics can require enormous computation power it is generally at the fore-front of computer science.

What is analytics in the field of data analysis? Analytics often involves studying past historical data to research potential trends, to analyze the effects of certain decisions or events, or to evaluate the performance of a given scenario. The goal of analytics is to use data to improve the information which can be used to make improvements or changes.

What is Web Analytics?

What is Web Analytics? Web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of data from the Internet. Or to put it another way, web analytics allows marketers to collect information about visitor interactions on a website.

• Those visitor interactions provide the web analytics information systems with the necessary information to track the referrer, note the IP address and country, count page views and the click activities of the visitor, break down results based on hour and day, show which browsers and operating systems they are using and which links or keywords they used to find the website.

With this information, a marketer can improve the websites creative content and information architecture.

Google Analytics What is it?

So, Google Analytics what is it? Well, Google Analytics is a free service to track all sorts of information about the visitors to your website. It basically generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

• The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists.

It is undoubtedly the most widely used free website statistics service application available. It is used on around 55% of the 10,000 most popular websites, (as currently ranked by Alexa).

Google Analytics has gained popularity because of both its simplicity and advanced features for not just professional marketers but newbies as well.

Most WordPress Google Analytics users will use nothing more than the basic stats for tracking the performance of their site and very rarely venture from the reports shown on the dashboard.

• Google Analytics can generate over 80 different reports to help analyze all possible data about your website traffic.

It not only tracks visitors to your site or the number of page views, it can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, Adsense and emails and much, much more.

Top Ways Google Analytics Web Analytics Benefits You

• AdWords advertisers can make Analytics available right in their AdWords account as a separate tab through a simple linking process. Advertisers can review extra data for their online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals), and pick out their highest performing ads.
• You can use Analytics to track other Google products including AdSense, Blogger, and Google Sites.
• See which pages get the most page views on your site.
• See which visitor groups became customers or did something else important to the success of your business by setting up goals.
• If the over 80 reports are not enough, you can also create your own reports with Custom Reporting, create the segments you want to see with Advanced Segmentation, or view multi-dimensional views of your data with Motion Charts.

The Google Analytics Tracking Code

Google Analytics will only track pages that contain the Google Analytics tracking code, this is a small Javascript snippet that needs to be added to each page of your site, either manually or through the use of plugins. See: How to Add Google Analytics To Your WordPress Blog Website Analysis.

Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting On Your Data (Video)

If you’ve just started to use Google Analytics and aren’t sure which reports to look at, this video provides a helpful 1st-time analysis walkthrough. You’ll learn how to interpret what you see in these key reports and what actions you should take as a result.

What are the Best Web Analytics Tools

First let me apologise to those who were expecting to see the list of my best web analytics tools here. As the list for the best web analytics tools was directly related to SEO tools I have decided to combine both lists. You can now see the list of my best web analytics tools and best SEO tools at SEO Tool Recommendations.

Analytics, What is Google Analytics Conclusion

Well, I hope I answered the question, what is web analytics and that you found something useful and enjoyed this article, Analytics, What is Google Analytics.

• If you require more than traditional web analytics, try ClickTale. ClickTale‘s analytics service is qualitative and provides a full video playback option for each individual visitor’s session. In addition, it uses meta statistics to create visual heatmaps and behavioural reports, as well as conversion analytics and traditional web statistics. For more information see my ClickTale review.

If you have any questions on, how do I get Google analytics or how do I add Google analytics then please don’t forget to let me have your thoughts in the comment box below. See you soon.