Google Analytics, If You Aren't Using This, You're Flying Blind!
Read More: This video shows you the features of Googly Analytics, a Free service from Google for traking visitors to your site. The benefits to understanding your traffic are immeasurable....although your visitors are. :)
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About the Author: Josh Thomas
Member Since: 02/25/2009
Company: Those Who Want To Make Money
Industry: Marketing and Advertising
Primary Web Site: http://JoshThomas.net
Google Analytics is great,
Google Analytics is great, and can give you good information about your traffic, the conversion rates and so on. It's worth spending time on, particularly setting up the goals you want to measure, so you can start seeing those conversion stats.
It's also worth using some form of tracking url, so you can cross-check the overall totals with your URL click counts. I don't profess to know everything about GA, there is a lot to get your head around to be honest, but I've been looking after a team GA account for a few months now, and the overall stats don't always quite stack up against the opt-ins arriving at the Auto Responder, nor the counters on the trackers we use (I have faith in those click counts, I have to, it's my code lol)
Partly that is due to the delay in data being loaded into GA, but I do wonder sometimes if a small amount of traffic slips through the cracks.
The only other tiny criticism is the URL generator tool they provide, if you want to use the advanced tracking (e.g. by campaign, split test ID and so on). It certainly confused some of our less tech-savvy team members. The solution for us was to wrap the whole thing up in a cloaker/tracker - that also helps avoid people stripping the analytics data from your URL string.
Overall though - GA is great. It's free, the information you can get from it is useful, and you can visualise your "funnel" - all very useful, and all worthy of being added to any Internet Marketing toolbox.
Gaz
Google Analytics
Gaz, You're right. It is not an end all, be all and most likely not 100% accurate. I feel it has reflected my visitors fairly well, but once traffic starts getting over 1,000 visits per day, perhaps there are a few that don't get counted.
I honestly don't use the URL generator and all of that other stuff you mentioned. It all sounds cool, but sticking the snippet into my source code does everything I need.
Appreciate your point of view, my friend. This should help others get a broader understanding of GA's usefulness.
Simplicity
Hi Josh
Actually that was a point I had in mind, and promptly forgot - all the other stuff is useful, but you can get some really good feedback just by adding the GA javascript code to your page.
In the situation I described, there's actually a whole load of people promoting the same web site (not a replicated site) so the additional tracking information is very useful for giving feedback to people.
There are other stats services out there, but Google works for me - even if small amounts of data are lost you still see the overall picture, and general trends. I echo your original point in a slightly different way; if you're not measuring and analysing your traffic, you can't know for sure what works and what doesn't, and any money you are spending on driving traffic is wasted.
Furthermore, if you're getting into creating your own pages, and you're not measuring the impact of small changes in content etc. you are throwing time and money away.
(Not "you" Josh, "you" in general lol)
All the best
Gaz