Using Google Analytics
Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 11:19pm Monday 02 February 2009
Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics is a leading free service which is offered by Google. This service generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to IT nerds. Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers such as search engines, job boards, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and other digital media.
It can be integrated with AdWords. The users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). The goals include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page and downloading of a particular file. Importantly, the goals can be monetized. By using Google Analytics, the marketers can determine which ads are performing and which are not. As a matter of fact, it provides the information to optimise or cull campaigns.
The main approach is to show high level dashboard type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the report set. With the help of analysis - poor performing pages can be identified using techniques including funnel visualization.
1. Visitors - Google Analytics can help track how many people visitor your site every hour, day, week, and month. This can be beneficial to track results of job searches, email marketing, press releases, promotions, etc. Being able to visualize how many people are using your site is a key part of determining the success of any Online Marketing strategy.
2. Geography - Whether your recruitment business is local, national or international, being able to track where visitors are coming from is very important. Analytics allows you to see where people are visiting sites from based on IP addresses. Where are your visitors coming from? How effective are your recruitment campaigns?
3. Pages - Google Analytics also enables you to gage which pages of a site are the most popular by tracking how visitors use the site and by following their most popular paths to the site. This can also help track broken links on a site. If an increased bounce rate happens on certain pages, it may be a red flag that something is amiss.
4. Incoming Links - A key success factor for increasing search engine rankings is having multiple incoming links to your site. Analytics can help gage which referring/incoming links are the most valuable. Are there any sites linked to your website? Job board traffic link outs?
5. Keywords - Google Analytics lets you see which keywords are the most popular at driving traffic to your site. This feature is a good way to judge the effectiveness of your site's content. By tracking the most popular keywords, you can find out if your site is sending the right message. Eg Jobs in Melbourne, Accounting Jobs, Recruitment Jobs in Victoria
6. Bounce Rate - A bounce rate reveals how many times visitors exit your site from certain pages. Being able to see where visitors are exiting can help troubleshoot issues such as broken links, page errors, etc.
7. Entrance Rates - The entrance rates on Google Analytics help you to track where visitors are entering your site. If there are multiple incoming links to your site, such as to the job search page, newsletter, contact forms, or just the home page, the effectiveness of the content prompting visitors to click can be analyzed.
8. Goals - With the Goals feature, it is easy to track specific parts of your site. For example, if there is a application form that should be filled out for interested visitors, the path to the application form would be copied into the Goal tool. When a visitor follows that particular path, it is called a Goal-conversion. This is great for all important features of a site, such as job search, newsletter sign ups, promotional offers, etc.
9. AdWords - Another great feature about Google Analytics is that it works with Google AdWords. By syncing these programs together, you can track returns on investment down to the cent. Verify your traffic to eliminate click fraud!
10. Time - Google Analytics can also track how long people stay on the site and on each page. Being able to track length of stay is a great way to judge how interesting the content is for each page in comparison to the rest of the site.
How do you go about using Google Analytics?