Google Analytics: Make Your Website Count (without a counter)

Remember the days when websites used numeric counters on their pages to see how many people had been to their site?

These counters quietly disappeared from the web and with good reason. They’re not very accurate, can’t track any demographic information and are usually not very well integrated into the layout of the site. Now there are better ways to track visitors using web analytics. While there are numerous companies and online services that provide web analytics, Google Analytics is the most popular.

Google Analytics-More than Just A Tool

Google Analytics is a free service that allows website owners to track visitors to their site. It goes far beyond just showing the number of people that went to a site. Some of the statistics that Google Analytics tracks are:

• visits to individual pages
• the date the visit occurred
• the geographical location of the user
• how long a user stays on a page

These stats can provide powerful information not only about who is visiting your site but what they are doing when they are there. Site owners can set goals, such as completion of a contact form, to track actual conversions and not just the number of visitors to a page. Another important statistic is the bounce rate, or how often users click though to a page and then leave immediately. If a page has a high bounce rate, it’s a sign that it needs retooling because the content is not compelling enough to keep the visitor on the site or it’s not what they were looking for.

This is only scratching the surface of what Google Analytics can do. Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you can look more in-depth by using the Visitors Flow tool to see how users move through your site. This tool shows a chart of how many visitors start on a particular page and shows each successive page visit until they leave the site.

If all of this information is more than you want to see, you can always run a custom report using only the metrics and dimensions you want to analyze. For example, you could run a report that limits the dimension to a specific city within a specific date range.

Google Analytics can be an invaluable tool for tracking website data. With the information Google Analytics gathers, you can optimize and refine your web pages so that users stay on your site, and accomplish what they want to do while visiting. AMG uses Google Analytics with all of our website designs to ensure that users are getting the best experience possible when they visit your site.

Are you looking for a way to help get more quality traffic and reduce your bounce rates?  Contact AMG today for a free website assessment!