My 7 Favorite Features of Google Analytics
- Image via CrunchBase
Google analytics is awesome! If you have a website/blog then you need google analytics to let you know how well you are doing. But what does analytics have to do with social media? EVERYTHING!
If you are trying to drive traffic to your blog/website through social media tactics, how else are you going to know if it is working or not? You could just throw something out there and hope for the best… but with analytics, you can throw something out there, see what the results are, throw something else out there, see what those results are and figure out the most effective way to reach your audience.
These are some of my favorite data points that google provides in google analytics…
Visitors:
- Map Overview: This will let you know the geographical location of people who visit your site. How is this helpful? Well if you are getting a lot of people from one area of the country or world, then you can better tailor your message to those people. Or, if you are targeting a specific area and not getting traffic from that area, you can try to adjust your marketing methods to better suit those people.
- New vs. Returning: How many new people are coming to your site? How many are returning visitors? If you have a good number of new people coming in and an increasing number of returning visitors… congratulations, you have content that attracts people and gets them excited to comeback! Having a high number of returning visitors or not can be a good or bad thing, depending on the purpose of your website. If you are changing or adding information constantly, like in a blog, you want people to return.
- Visitor Trending – Visits: This is really cool because you can see the days of the week you are getting the most visits. If the trend is that the most people are coming on Thursday and the least amount of people are coming on Sunday, you’ll know to post your most important stuff on Thursday and your least, if anything at all, on Sunday. Maximize when people are most likely to see what you have to offer!
- Visitor Loyalty – Loyalty: Want to know how many loyal followers you have? This shows how many people have been to your site 1 time… how many have been 2 times, and continues on up.
Traffic Source:
- Overview: This gives you the basic run down of where your traffic is coming from. This could be from people typing in your URL directly or links from search engines, like google, or links from other websites. This is helpful if someone is directing a lot of traffic your way from their site or if you have a profile on a social network with a link on it, how much does that drive traffic to your site. It also tells you what key words people are using to find your site.
Content:
- Top Content: Here you can see which pages get the most traffic, this let you know what people are interested in the most. If you have one post on a particular topic that gets a lot of traffic, then that should tell you that people are interested in that topic and you probably should write more posts on the subject.
- Site Overlay: Now this is just pure gold and worth every penny you are not spending on Google analytics (because it is free!). This does an overlay of your site and shows what people are clicking on the most! I can’t even begin to emphasize the super usefullness of this information! If you post a banner up on a page and people are clicking on the left navigation more than the banner, you know to adjust what goes where. You can see where people are going and what they do when they get there.
Now this is just scratching the surface of the awesome power that is google analytics. We haven’t even touched on the capabilities of when you combine it with a campaign or in conjunction with something like bit.ly URLs… and A B testing… don’t even get me started!
The best part about it… and I mean this is THE BEST PART ABOUT IT… it is completely, entirely and whole heartedly free! You can’t beat that price!
Tags: Data, Google, Google Analytics, Search Engines, Searching, Social network, Web search engine