What is Google analytics???

It is  free service that extracts information from websites and generate statistics about the visitors to that website. The original designers of this program were Urchin Software cooperation who called it ‘Urchin on demand’. Google bought the company in 2005 and renamed the program ‘Google Analytics’.

Google is still selling the software ‘Urchin on demand’ and released the sixth edition in April 2008, sales are conducted through agents that offer a value added service. Google Analytics is available free to all users, even if they do not advertise through Google however some generous limitations apply to users that do not advertise through Google.
Once these limits have been reached there are nominal service fees charged for the use of this software.

Watch this video in a new window30DC – Using Google Analytics

How it works for online benefit

Users are required to add a Google Analytics Tracking Code, also referred to as a ‘page tag’ to every page on their website. This tracking code loads a file from the Google server and links between the website and the users account number.
This tracking code also installs cookies used to store anonymous information regarding visitor recurrence, time straps and referrers on visitor’s computers. Data is processed hourly and data processing is only a few hours behind real time.
There has been many concerns raised about making confidential information available to Google, giving them access to sales figures, rates and advertisement costs but inevitably you will need to feed some company with this information in order to have detailed reporting available when needed.

What google analytics can do?

Visitors can arrive at a website via a link on e-mail, search engines, pay per click advertising or digital documents; Google analytics keeps track of this and delivers detailed reports on this information to the client.
Pay per click campaigns on Google can be intensively monitored and conversions to sales easily determined. Sales conversions are monitored by gathering information from the funnel pages on a website, these are the pages leading directly to a sale.
This can give you vital information about abandoned sales, indicating possible problems in the purchasing process. This program is very flexible and can run reports weekly, monthly or any other periods that you may select.

How you can benefit

Most companies would not have the professional resources to do website analysis in-house, this would however be extremely time consuming and would require a large amount of disk space. By using Google Analytics you can save time and money. Google analytics can help you determine which ads are not generating many sales and which ads are performing very well. By canceling the ads not delivering the desired return on investment your company will save considerably.
Ads that are leading traffic to your website with a high conversion rate might then be further optimized to capitalize on a high ranking ad. The Google Analytics reports can easily be used in return of investment calculations and used in budgeting or other marketing decisions.