Free Analytics for Your Site

I'm so thankful for Google because I cannot even imagine how much companies would be charging for this service had Google not come along and begun providing it free of charge to any website owner who needs it. 

What exactly is Google Analytics? It is a free service offered by Google that provides detailed information about website traffic. At a glance, some of the interesting pieces of information that you can find out about your site visitors are:

• Where they are located - country, state, city
• The number of unique and return visitors
• Which browser they are viewing your site from
• The bounce rate - When a visitors lands on your site and then leave (or bounces). The higher the bounce rate, the less engaged your visitors are. You want to aim for lowering your bounce rate - capturing the interest of your visitors on that first page so that they will want to click through to more pages
• The average length of time visitors are staying on your site
• The number of pages your visitors are viewing
• Plus a wealth of other valuable information that can help you plan your online marketing strategy

It is very easy to sign up for a Google Analytics account. First, you will need a Gmail account (you can use a different email account but a Gmail account makes it easier to access all of the other tools within the Google platform). Sign up for that by going to www.gmail.com to create an account.

• Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click "Sign up"

The process is pretty straightforward. You will be asked information about the website that you want Google Analytics to analyze. This one account enables you to monitor multiple websites so if you have several websites, you can add them all. Once the appropriate information has been added, Google Analytics will generate code that will need to be added within the HTML tags of your home page. If you have hired a website designer, s/he will be familiar with this process. If you are designing the site, there are instructions on where you place the coding within your page.

This is very valuable information to have. If you know that most of the visitors to your site are spending less a minute on your site and the bounce rate is 98%, you realize that you have to make some changes to keep them engaged at that first page so that will go to other pages. If after making some changes, you notice that the average length of time spent on the site is trending upward and your bounce rate is decreasing, you know that you are on the right path and you may want to build on that marketing activity.

With Google Analytics, you can create analysis reporting not only for yourself, but this is also a service that you can provide to your clients. If you are a web or blog designer, there are ways in which you can provide information to your clients via reporting so that they won't have to deal with it. Many business owners have no interest in running reports to analyze web data but will gladly pay someone else to do it. They want to know if their online efforts are paying off and what they need to do if improvements are needed. This is definitely a value-added service that business owners in creative and technical industries that deal with creating online solutions may want to consider. Should you decide to go this route and perform client reporting, you can click on "Custom Reporting" within Google Analytics and you can literally drag and drop components of the report and let Google do the rest. The data can then be exported to a spreadsheet application if you choose to do so or you can just print from Google Analytics.

Isn't Google awesome!!!