Google Analytics: How to Manage Same
Okay, you’re website is up and running; your online marketing campaign is bringing in traffic with both SEO and Social Media tactics; you are seeing new leads or revenues coming in, but you want to know more about the rationale behind those visitors to increase your ROI on the current spend – but you don’t know how. If that’s a fair description of where you are right now, then today’s blog post is definitely for you.
Google Analytics is the answer…..got it? But, you’ll immediately say…how do I use same to really find out where my site visitors are coming from, what they’re looking at on my site, how long they stay (i.e. the site stickyness), what call-to-action worked to get me those leads….etc. etc.
And again, the answer is Google Analytics….and to help you along, I’ve got some online help for same….
First, you probably already know that Google Analytics is free and fairly well packed with features and the ability to generate reports, charts, numbers etc. that can help you find out the answers to all of your questions. From what I’ve learned about how GA was born, I believe that Google bought Urchin about a decade ago or so….raided it for basic analytic algos, created GA and then rolled it out free. At that time too, Urchin was still being supported by Google but I think the costs were something like $10k per server….it was a GREAT big beautiful analytics package and I loved using same there for quite a spell. However, Google deprecated same about a year ago…so GA is the tool of choice for most of the world.
Assuming that yes, you have GA up and running….you will want to check out the following great sites to find that help…
Occam’s Razor – is site that helps IMMENSELY written by Avinash Kaushik, a googler and yes, so knowledgeable about same that he’s written books on same too…. This site is chock full of Google help, rationales, strategies, tactics….Avinash knows and that’s one reason why he’s on the Board of the Rotman Centre at the University of Toronto….and yes, I’ve heard him speak and he knows analytics, eh!
This is where you’ll find enough info on GA to begin to comprehend what can be done…at least that’s the site that I went to to learn as much as I could on behalf of my clients when we moved away from Urchin and over to GA….you’d be hard pressed to find a better spot to begin!
Econsultancy Dashboards – this is a great aggregation of various dashboards that have been formulated so that you can simply “click & receive” same directly into your own GA account. You heard right…just click to have that dashboard installed directly into your own account…and some of these ones….or these ones…are real doozies!
I especially liked the SEO dashboard here….it’s loaded with code that allows you to see everything from your best organic keywords to pages per visit too….all items that yup, an SEO practitioner will need to think on!
And finally today, over at the top notch socialmediaexaminer.com site, is a great piece for you to begin to understand how Social Media plays a role in GA…and how you can use same to build some really nice traffic too! This is all about how to assign custom link tags to the links you share on social networking sites. This enables you to fully use Google Analytics to gain valuable insights into how well your various social networking site presences are working for you.
Google Analytics makes custom campaigns incredibly easy to work with. By using their Custom URL Builder, you can create specific links for each of your campaigns and use these to share online.
All of these tactics and the strategies behind same are worth investigating…and then spending the time to learn more…honestly, if you can’t figure out the rationale behind what drives your site visitors to come and check out your site, then you’re not working with enough data to make any kind of an informed decision….something I’m afraid too too many millions of SMB owners are guilty of, eh! Use Google Analytics in all it’s glory to increase your own Canadian SEO traffic….and watch your revenues increase!