Google Analytics is an enterprise-class web analytics solution offered free by Google. Google Analytics generates detailed statistics about the visitors and web traffic generated for a website. Using Google Analytics with your website is a great idea because it takes minutes to sign up for and will provide you all the necessary metrics you’ll need to determine what is working, or not working, on your website for successfully capturing new sales for your business.

Its intuitive user interface provides you easy access to all data, allowing you to quickly obtain the key information you need for your website. Google Analytics keeps track of how all visitors found your website including exact keyword searches from different search engines and which other websites linking to you referred visitors to you. Google Analytics allows you to track the effectiveness of your marketing programs, email marketing, pay per click networks, unpaid organic search, and much more.

Google Analytics is also integrated with Google AdWords. Google Adwords will display an ad for your business on Google search results pages and their advertising network on a pay per click basis; that is, you only pay Google an advertising fee if people click your ads directing them to your website.

Using Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords optimizes your online marketing campaigns by tracking your sites landing page quality and conversion goals. By using Google Analytics, you can determine which ads are performing well, and which are not, providing the information to minimize or select appropriate keywords for Adwords campaigns.

The following are 10 essential features of Google Analytics:

1. Google Analytics allows you to compare data about the performance of your site at two different time periods. It also allows you to chart the data immediately to get a better view of your site. It shows you the performance of your site based on area, city or country metrics.
2. Providing referring sites and search results metrics are the basic features of any analytics program, but with Google Analytics you can get statistics not only on the number of visitors a link partner is sending, but the quality of the traffic.
3. Once you have your business goals, for example sales & marketing, setup in Google Analytics you are able to determine and thus control vast amounts of data with regard to what’s working and what’s not in your marketing strategy.
4. Google Analytics allows complete Adwords integration. This means it provides data on each group, campaign, and keyword. Specifically, you can look at each of these areas and see the number of displays, clicks, your cost, conversion, etc.
5. It enables you to customize the rich features provided in your Google Analytics dashboard. You can move the most often used reports to the dashboard for fast access by just clicking the “Add to Dashboard” link.
6. The Google Analytics dashboard feature allows you to schedule and automatically send recurring email updates to yourself or other recipients within your business using multiple formats.
7. Google Analytics shows you the popularity and effectiveness of each link on every page of your site. These powerful and graphical reports display the effectiveness of your site design in a visual model.
8. Google Analytic’s naviGAtion summary report shows where your users go from the homepage, or how most of them get to your contact page. If people aren’t following your desired naviGAtion, it means you probably need to correct some things on your page to compel users to click on the areas you desire.
9. Google Analytics tells you what search keywords people are using to find your site. If certain keywords are proving hot, you might want to consider catering Google Adwords keyword buys, content, and offers to them. It tells you how your customers find you.
10. The search engine traffic metric illustrates which search engines are sending the most traffic to your website and how well it’s converting into sales. This will help you optimize your marketing spend and SEO efforts.

In addition to the 10 reasons mentioned above, Google Analytics also has a “Report Finder” to help you search for your archived reports, helps you view your website’s bounce rate over time, shows connection speed data which helps you determine how to prioritize and optimize your site’s design and load time, and much more. To start using Google Analytics navigate to http://www.google.com/analytics/ You can either register using your existing Google account, for example if you already have a Gmail account, or sign up for a new one. Google Analytics is a feature rich, free application that every website owner should consider integrating into their site.

Author: Steve Kozyk
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

You are making website design, search engine optimization and growing you’re business harder than it needs to be. Nothing is more frustrating than spending the hard earned time and money necessary to design the perfect website, to find that it isn’t producing the results you had wanted. There’s a lot of dismay on the web about what is essential to succeed online. A lot of people think it starts and stops with a great website. Honestly the truth is, that is only an appreciable part of it.

At some point you have considered website design and SEO. You may have even tried to design your own website with applying SEO and not reached the effect you hoped to obtain. Like many other online website design and marketing techniques, website design and SEO together can and does work, by applying yourself and comprehending which keywords your website is being found with, by keeping familiar of tendencies in the industry and responding to them. With some fundamental awareness that you have previously been missing, you can open the avenues to new and exciting openings for profits that you have been absent from.

Website Design + Analytics + SEO = Online Success. Let’s begin with the presumption that you are wanting more visitors to your website, to effectively grow your business. With 86.7% of Internet users using search engines to find websites [Enquiro Search Study] it’s apparent that your website has to come up high in the search engines rankings, so you can get your piece if not most of those potential customers. There is more additional information than just getting your website a high ranking. Implementing Analytics to your group of tools is what will help you get the most out of not only your website design and SEO tactics, but ALL your online marketing crusades.

Analytics, as distinct by Wikipedia is the measurable extent of the actions of visitors to a website. In a commercial view, it non-specifically refers to the measure of which components of the website work towards the business goals; for instance, which pages stimulate visitors your purchase of your website. There is an immense number of uses for website analytics. Website owners can use it to estimate website function and navigation as well as measuring customer interest in different advertisements and marketing campaigns, or it could be used to construct replication of the “whole picture” of your website’s lucrative gains. We want to center our attention on website analytics for website design and SEO goals in this article.

Looking at Analytics as it advantages to website SEO: Good keyword phrases are more competitive today than ever, it takes more work to drive traffic to your site, and once you do you have to quickly obtain the interest of your visitors. Those visitors are very valuable and are the result of significant SEO efforts. Therefore, it is critical to understand how visitors got to your site (which engines are driving traffic and which keywords), and even more critical to discover what they do once they get there. You need web Analytics reporting to tell you when and where people are leaving your site, where they are spending their time and much more. With this information you will then know where to make the necessary content changes to get optimal results from your web site pages.

Analytics is not new, but the marriage of SEO and Analytics is, and it deserves your attention. Analytics is not something most SEO Firms offer. In order to stay a step ahead of your competitors and not only get all the traffic you can, but actually convert those visitors to sales, the information in Analytics is essential.

Without the time or knowledge of Analytics, it can be overwhelming. The fact is, it does take time to learn everything you need to get the most out of Analytics. Hiring an SEO Firm That Offers Analytics Is Guaranteed to Increase Your Traffic and Sales. Marketers have a growing number of channels driving people to their site. They need to be able to track all of those sources and see where people from each source go and what they do. With that information you can make changes and quickly learn what your site visitors are responding to, and without increasing your traffic at all, you can increase the results you are getting.

However, since there isn’t a website out there that isn’t interested in more traffic, taking things a step further and implementing SEO to acquire new traffic and using Analytics to get a higher conversion rate from the site visitors, you are guaranteed to quickly get better results than you currently have.

What Can Analytics Tell You That You Don’t Already Know?

To outline the importance of the information that you are currently missing, simply ask yourself these questions:

What are your site visitors doing once they get to your site?

Are they doing what you want them to do? Where are they coming from? How often are they coming? How long are they staying? Do they get error pages on your site? What actions are they taking? What marketing activities are producing higher conversion rates for you? Which keywords produce the highest conversion rate for you?

If you can’t answer every one of those questions (plus many others) then you need the information that Analytics has to offer. Let’s look at HOW the answers to those questions will help your business.

What are your site visitors doing once they get to your site? Are they doing what you want them to do?

If you know what catches people’s attention first, and it isn’t what you want, then you can make quick alterations and get feedback from Analytics to tell you if it is working. You keep tweaking until your data tells you that your visitors are taking the action you want quickly. This will result in increased sales, or opt-ins or whatever it is your MDA (most desired action) is. Where are they coming from?

- Understanding where your traffic comes from will guide you in directing your advertising and marketing dollars to the sources that benefit you the most. How often are they coming?

- Are you getting repeat visitors? If not, you’ll want to add something that will make people come back. Many sites don’t get a sale on the first visit – so trying different techniques to drive traffic back and then measuring the results through Analytics gives you more opportunity to get the sale. How long are they staying?

-Are your visitors leaving quickly? That tells you that you need to improve your text and what you have to offer. On the flip side, do they stay for a long time but never order? That tells you that you need to work in stronger calls to action and more compelling offers to get the order. With the information from Analytics reports, you can use this information to get more out of the visitors already coming to your site and also feel confident that your site is now improved for all the new visitors you will get from your SEO campaign. Do they get error pages on your site?

-If your website has errors you are losing traffic and sales. One look at your Analytics will tell you what errors people are encountering on your site. This alone is vastly important. With so many sites out there, people are going to quickly leave a site with errors and find a better one. Eliminate that issue as quickly as you can.

What actions are they taking?

Determine if that really “neat” feature you added to your site is distracting your visitors from your true goal – getting them to buy, or opt-in, or call you. Knowing what people respond to on your site also gives you insight into your visitors – do they like the pages with more pictures? Do they respond to the text? Once you know your visitor, you can better target your marketing materials to them – resulting in increased sales, opt-ins, calls etc.

What marketing activities are producing higher conversion rates for you?

Whether it’s a banner ad, an email campaign or Pay-Per-Click, learn which campaigns have the highest conversion rates. Are your campaigns seasonal? Learn when it’s best for you to start and stop them. Getting all the details about your campaigns helps you to laser focus your marketing efforts for maximum results.

Which keywords produce the highest conversion rate for you?

Most people tend to focus on the words that are searched for the most. Those keywords may produce the most traffic, but do they produce the highest conversion rates? If one keyword drives 150 visitors a day, but only 5 out of a 150 buy your product and another keyword only delivers 50 visitors, but 10 people buy your product – you are getting a higher conversion rate from the word with the lower search count. So, you get fewer visitors and more sales. You would do well to focus on the keywords that produce the sales. Understanding this information can help you with your content addition (which will help you drive more traffic for those words).

Those are just a handful of ways that you can use the information Analytics offers to get more out of your website and all of your marketing efforts.

Growing Your Business the Easy Way

Combining website design, SEO and Analytics is the way of the future. Drive new traffic to your website and ensure you have all that data you need to make the most out of that traffic.

Since Analytics and marketing isn’t a common offering by web development firms, some websites gives you the edge by combining these two essential services. Combining the two services gives you the convenience of one-stop shopping and the assurance that you are going to get actual results out of your website design.

Having your web development company prepare your Analytics reports saves you time, and also allows them to tweak and adjust optimizations as necessary. Your reports are also analyzed by a marketing expert and include suggestions for improving the problem areas – so you aren’t left sorting through endless pages of data with no real ideas for an action plan.

Conclusion:

Whether you are currently running an SEO campaign, and simply need to add Analytics, or whether you are looking to start SEO and Analytics, now is the time to take action. For more details on Analytics and which website development package is best for you, simply contact us.

Author: Todd Herman
Article Source: EzineArticles.com