Google Analytics
Lesson 5 Google Analytics
If you are serious about learning website design then you need to be serious about learning Google Analytics. What exactly is Analytics? In short it is the statistics of your website, who visited, how long they stayed, and what they did while they were there. These statistics are invaluable when it comes to finding and fixing potential problems with your webiste. We are positive these lessons will be several parts long as there is so much to learn. This part will purely focus on the basics, how to set it up, what are some of the important numbers, and some things you can do. Honestly entire books have been written on Google Analytics, in fact we own 3 of them, it is still important that you understand the basics.
Installing Google Analytics:
To install Google Analytics is about an easy of thing as possible just follow the simple steps found below for guidance.
1. Sign Up At www.google.com/analytics
2. Place The Code On The bottom of every page of your website
3. Wait 24 hours and start collecting data
Yes it really is that easy, in fact we sort of threw in the third step just as a best practice, the code sometimes takes a little bit to start passing data but for the most part you will start seeing data within 3-4 hours. Below is an example of what the code looks like:
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-3320334-1");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
If you have multiple websites you will see only the number after “UA-“changes the rest remains the same. If this is your first look at html code it can be a little overwhelming but what you see above is what is called a script, it sends data gathered back to Google to be displayed in your analytics account. Once this is on every page it can follow visitors from page to page and even tell you where they are from. It also shares important information like bounce rate which is the term for people who land on your website and immediately leave without viewing any additional pages. In this lesson we will take a look at some other important terms you will find in your google analytics.
Bounce Rate:This means the visitor who comes across your site simply views the one page they landed on, it doesn’t mean they didn’t spend 10 minutes on that page, it just means they didn’t view any other pages and that typically means they didn’t find something they were looking for.
Time On Site: This one is real simple, it is just the total amount of time a user spends browsing around your website, can be very useful, the longer you can get people to spend on your site the higher the liklihood they will become a conversion.
Conversion: This term is pretty broad, it can mean a lot of things, in short it means the website visitors did what you wanted them to, this can mean they purchased something, made a phone call, sent an email, or signed up for a free trial. It is important to track conversions for a lot of reasons.
Pages Viewed: This one is pretty simple; it just represents the number of pages the user visited while on your website.
Referrals: This tells you where your traffic came from, some visitors will come across your website via search engines, others maybe via paid serach, and still more will go to it directly and be referred by a wide variety of other sources. It is important to know where your visitors are coming from.
There are loads of other terms we will address in more advanced Google Analytics lessons. Learning your way around this amazingly powerful tool can make all the difference of whether or not your website can succeed.
