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Improve performance with Google Analytics

19/06/2009 send to a friend

Paul Myers is back and he’s talking Google Analytics. This time it’s how you can check your website against Google’s search engine parameters and improve its performance.

What’s it all about

Everyone wants their website to be seen and be ranked highly by search engines like Google. But not everyone understands what site visitors are looking for once they find you. That’s why Google offers a free service called Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a useful tool for casual and in-depth information because you can track up to fifty pages and receive a treasure trove of information on each page. It tracks site visitors to compile data on where they came from, how much time was spent on a page, and the geographical placement of the visitor.

How to use Google Analytics

The first step is to create an account at http://analytics.google.com. Once you’ve established an account, simply enter the address of the website you’re tracking. You’ll be given a tracking code that will need to be entered into every webpage you want to track. If your site has multiple pages, you’ll need to add this tracking code on each page and place it prior to the <body> tag. You can confirm that you’ve properly placed the tracking code in your website profiles’ ‘Overview’ page by checking its ‘Status’ column. A ‘tracking status unknown’ icon will show until Google’s system detects the code. Typically it will take approximately 24 hours before you can start tracking results.

In-depth report tutorials

Once you’ve started collecting data and become comfortable with the fundamentals of Google Analytics, you’ll want to get in to some of the more advanced features and really boost your knowledge of how your site is performing.

Google Analytics custom reports: This is the nuts and bolts tutorial on creating and saving custom reports.
Internal site searches on Google Analytics : See why internal site searches are important and how to set them up on your site, how to interpret the site search data, and how to determine breakout trends in the data.
Event tracking/virtual page views: Watch how to set up a virtual page view, and when to use virtual page views instead of event tracking, see how you can set up event tracking, and differences between Total Events and Unique Events.
Variables in custom visitor segmentation: See how to set up and view User Defined variables and the best way to set them up.
Ecommerce tracking reports: Aids for enabling and tracking your ecommerce data and where to find key information in your ecommerce reports.

All these tutorials will give you actionable information that you can use to find trouble spots and high spots on your site.

Paul Myers, Optimas Solutions

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