Sick of those boring traffic analysis tools that just gives you boring visitor numbers and this buzz word called “Hits”? Google Analytics has spruced site traffic analysis to a whole other level…and best part is that it is FREE!!!

Google Analytics ( http://analytics.google.com ) has many cool features. The core elements Loadsys uses are Visitors, Traffic Sources, Map Overlay, and Site Overlay.

Visitors
This area of the tool allows you to see how many visitors visited your site in a specified date range, how many of those visitors were unique, and how long they stayed on the site. This information is very important in determining possible changes you should make to your website’s homepage to make the visitor stay longer. In addition, it shows you what pages on your site were visited the most.

Traffic Sources
Where did these people come from? Who is getting me my traffic? These are the questions that traffic sources answers. On top of just getting you websites the users were on to get to you, Google also shows you if you were found by a google search and better yet will show you effectiveness of your Google Adwords campaign by telling you if the referrer was a keyword you are currently bidding on.

Map Overlay
Probably the coolest feature of this utility, this tool allows you to see where visitors are coming from, all the way down to the city level. It does this graphically by allowing you to click a map that is shaded by where visitors came from the most. For example, it starts at the globe level showing all of the continents…of course the USA is probably delivering the most visitors, so you will see the USA shaded darker. You then drilldown to the USA and can then see all of the states. You will see the states with the most visitors shaded darker than the rest.

Site Overlay
The site overlay is a good analysis tool for seeing what parts of your site attracts your visitors. Basically, Google Analytics shows you your site as it would normally look, except that it will have overlays telling you where people clicked the most. So, the beauty of this is that you can try to see your site from the visitors point of view and see what changes you can possibly make to better attract them. A good example on the Loadsys site was that we saw a large amount of people were attracted to this one site we did in our portfolio. Because of this, we moved that item in our portfolio up to the top to make it the first portfolio item noticed by the visitor. This resulted in a better conversion of visitors into clients.

Google provides many nice utilities for no charge that can help improve business from different angles.

Tags: google analytics, SEO, site analysis, traffic analysis

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 8:26 am and is filed under Business, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.