Summary
Google analytics is a powerful program that measures performance of your website - for free

Google analytics - Free website statistics program

Google Analytics is a free program that offers detailed reports of your website. It is an online tool that will help measure how effective your website is performing.

Google Analytics offers the following features:

• How people find your website
• What people type into a search engine to find your site
• How many unique visitors visited your site
• How often did the same visitor come back
• The bounce rate
• The country location of the unique visitor
• How long a unique visitor stays on the page
• Tacking and integration of Google adwords if you are advertising on google
• Setting up website goals
• And alot more

A brief understanding of statistics and analytics and how they help your business website

It's important to remember that website measurement is "unique visitors", not "hits". Alot of web pages use a hit counter - this is an incorrect measurement as these tools normally count the same visitor every time they view a page - and they look unprofessional.

The measurement is based on unique visitors but your website success is not determined by the amount of unique website visitors. The key factor in determining website success is the bounce rate and returning unique visitors.

The bounce rate is how many unique visitors leave your site immediately after entering the landing page. You may have a large amount unique visitors but if these visitors "bounce" out of your site straight away then they bring no value to your website.

Website goals

Using google analytics goals feature, you can define a goal and measure how people reach this gaol. For example a goal maybe to purchase something from your website, sign up to a newsletter or fill out the contact form.

You can determine how many people convert your goal, how many people drop out before they reach the goal and how people navigate the site to reach your goal. This will help you understand why or why not your goals are being reached.

For example your goal was to get somebody to sign up to the newsletter. You find out that only 1% of people are signing up to your newsletter. The goal tool will give you the measurements - but you will still need to investigate why people are not signing up.

Installing Google Analytics

You need to sign up to google analytics and obtain your tracking number. Google will then give you code you have to place in every page of your website. If you do not have the ability to add code to your website, hire a website developer.

It takes around 24 hours for the statisitics to be displayed in Google Analytics.

This article is written by Sam Steele, project manager at DeboSoft - a website and graphics design company and a Google small business solution provider. Need help setting up google analytics? - contact DeboSoft.