Why use Google Analytics

* Translucent Media includes free installation of Google Analytics on every site we design and develop. *

Google offers a free statistical tool to analyze your website visitors, called Google Analytics, which is very easy to use. All you need is a Google account. We can set up your GA account and install the tracking code (Javascript) for you.

Google Analytics tracks visitors from all sources, including display ad campaigns, PPC (pay per click) campaigns, organic searches from search engines, email marketing, bookmarks, websites that have your inbound links, and other digital sources like URLs embedded in PDF files or Power Point slides. It designed for online marketers who want to track visitors to their sites for improving user experience and conversions.

Using Google Analytics, you can not only view the number of unique visitors to you site, you can also see which sites they came from (backlinks), how long they spent on your site, how long the average visitor spends on specific pages, the keywords that bring them in from the search engines, and specific budget/conversion info from Google ads.

Why do you want to use Google Analytics?

One reason to use Google Analytics is if you want to know if your marketing campaign is going in the right directiont. For example, if you are doing article marketing to drive traffic to your site, you want to know the article directories that are the most effective in sending visitors to your website.

You don't want to waste your time submitting articles to directories that are not sending you any traffic or a very low amount of traffic. You can use the info from Google Analytics to write more articles and submit to only those directories that are sending you a good amount of traffic.

If you are using a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, you should use split testing to test the effectiveness of different ads. You want to know which ads are performing better than the others in terms of conversions. If you integrate Google Analytics with your AdWords PPC campaigns, you will be able to track the effectiveness of each ad you are using in your PPC campaigns.

Using data from Google Analytics, you will be able to find the pages that are getting the most traffic from search engines, bookmarks and inbound links. Knowing this information helps you spend time on optimizing only those pages that are getting the most traffic. Knowing which pages are the most popular is invaluable when you are deciding where to spend your time optimizing.

You can work on providing improved user experience of your site on those high traffic pages. You can make it easier to navigate those pages from anywhere in your site -- for example, place a "What's New" on a sidebar on those pages.

If you're selling ads on your site to advertisers directly, you need a visitor portfolio of your site. This portfolio contains information about the number of monthly unique visitors to your site, visitors' geographic locations, the number of page views per visitor, the bounce rate of visitors, etc. The more information about your visitors you can provide to your prospecting advertisers, the better is your chance of commanding a premium price for advertisement spots on your site. Google Analytics will help you develop a visitors portfolio of your site, and you can export your data as a PDF file to send to your prospective advertisers.

Even if you are not going to use visitor data immediately, you can still sign up for Google Analytics and let the tool start collecting visitor data about your site. When you need the data, you will have it ready to go in your Google Analytics account.

Let us know if you want us to design or redesign your site, with free Google Analytics included.