Learning to Use Google Analytics

by Dennis D. McDonald

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for the free Google Analytics service. This free Google service  tracks web site usage including frequency, type, and source of visits, as well as behavior of visitors after they come to a site’s initial web page. I figured that, if Google was going to be knowing everything about my site in order to help it calculate advertising rates, I should at least take advantage of the data.

The variety of statistic available from Google is almost bewildering. Many are more appropriate to commercial web sites where money changes hands. My site is a self-supported promotional site where I write about professional and personal interests, but I decided to start looking at the statistics anyway.

I’m glad I did. I already know from my web publishing service provider (Squarespace) that links  from other web pages and from RSS and Atom feeds are more important (numerically) than search engine queries in generating raw site traffic.

Poring through the Google Analytics data this was also very clear. What I saw was the overwhelming importance of my main page (called “Recent Postings” here) as being the initial touch point for the vast majority of my visitors. Based on this I decided to beef up the ability of this main page to “capture” and link visitors to “inside” pages in order to reduce the number of visitors who “bounced” after visiting only one page. That’s why I’ve peppered my initial page with so many internal links. Using Google Analytics I’ll now be able to track how many people visit just one page, and for those who stay around, where they go in my site from each initial page visited.

The graphic below shows the relative sizes of the different page groups in terms of incoming visits:

 

The majority of “entrances” to All Kind Food come in through the main page which I call “recent postings.” This is followed by pages in the “managing technology” section, then by various “movie reviews.”

This latter fact surprised me somewhat. I had not expected so many hits on the movie reviews relative to the technology related sections. Looking through the data more closely, I see (but I’ll have to test this hypothesis) that it appears that the main page and the “managing technology” pages seem to be more likely to be visited by people coming in via direct links, while my movie reviews are more likely to be hit by those referred via a search engine.

So, that’s my first attempt at using Google Analytics to tell me something about the behavior of visitors to my modest web site. I still have much to learn, but I’m already picking up some useful tips on how to look at the statistics generated by Google and by my provider Squarespace.

The data, for example, are shedding some light on a topic that has plagued me from the beginning, which is how to balance the variety of interests reflected in the web site, and whether or not I should break the site up into different parts. That may still happen, but for now, I’m going to look a lot deeper into these numbers. 

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Entries in this series:

• Learning to Use Google Analytics
• Learning to Use Google Analytics, Part 2
• Learning to Use Google Analytics, Part 3
• Learning to Use Google Analytics, Part 4

• Learning to Use Google Analytics, Part 5

Comments

[Philippe Borremans]

Hi Dennis, I am also using SquareSpace so if you could tell me exactly where you copy/pasted the Google Analytics code in your blog that would help me enormously... Thanks.

[Dennis D. McDonald]

One of the things I didn't mention in the original article is that I had to export the data from Gooogle Analytics (which is easy) into a spreadsheet that I could manipulate directly. While the variety of Google Analytics reports is almost bewildering, the service does not yet appear to provide the user with the ability to collapse and recombine records and categories on an ad hoc basis, which I had to do externally in Excel.

[Dennis D. McDonald]

Since I published the above Anita Campbell on her "Selling to Small Business" site has published a very nice review of Google Analytics in relation to small business. It's located here: http://blogs.bnet.com/smallbusiness/?p=130

She was kind enough to ask me for a quote, which I provided (a basically positive view of Google Analytics based on my own experience).

I recommend her writeup for several reasons.

First, Anita's focus is on small business. This is a key point. Whether you are a small business selling to small businesses, or you are a small business as a buyer, a tool like Google Analytics provides a wealth of useful information you might not otherwise be able to afford.

Second, Anita and several others have pointed out thet Google Analytics is not the only tool on the block that lets you analyze your own web traffic. This doesn't take away from the value of this Google product but does suggest that there may be competition in this sector of management tools you can take advantage of.

Third, and this concept is threaded throughout Anita's article, tools such as Google Analytics can be seen as "levelling the playing field" when it comes to understanding how to sell into a particular market. The data that feeds Analytics, after all, is a byproduct of normal web based transactions that are (or can be) visible to all. Sidestepping for a moment issues of privacy and data ownership, a tool like Google Analytics lets you dip your analytical bucket into the vast onrushing stream of web traffic, irrespective of the size of your organization. How you take advantage of this, I think, is more related to how clever and smart you are than how many people work for you.