The Google Analytics Beta: Improving Profits through Web
Site Analytics

by Ross W. Lambert, The Midnight Marketer

Web site analytics, for those who might not be familiar with
the term, is the tracking of various performance metrics
for a given web site. The metrics themselves can range from
the simple (and relatively useless) count of " hits", i.e.
requests for a given resource such as a single web page,
image file, etc., to the measure of far more complex
interactions. These complicated interactions can be totally
arbitrary; for example, you might want to know the number of
orders from visitors who were referred by search engines
and scrolled at least halfway down a long sales page.

That assumes, of course, that you can figure out how to
configure all that tracking, interpret the results and
afford the monthly fees for the providers of the service.
The cost issue is apparently solved: Google Analytics
(http://google.com/analytics) is currently free in its beta
version, and early indications are that it will remain so.
However, a word of caution is in order: The Terms of Service
referenced on the Google Analytics home page seems to
indicate that Google can and will make use of your site's
data, at least in aggregate form (that is, mixed in with
everybody else).

In many minds Google is starting to become a Big
Brother-like presence on the web, hence its motives are
suspect pretty much by definition. Personally, I consider my
site's aggregate data a fair trade for the value I will
extract from their software, but you will have to make up
your own mind. If you're not bothered by Google knowing as
much about your web site as you do, then Google Analytics
looks very promising. It is a smart, easy-to-use
implementation that hits the sweet spot of web analytics.


The Sweet Spot: Easy Yet Powerful

The sweet spot I'm referring to is really the point where
most of us live. We don't have the technical know-how to
configure the most complicated tracking scenarios and even
if we could, we don't have the analytical savvy to make any
sense of the data. Google has found the sweet spot by making
tracking configuration quite easy, and providing pre-cooked
role-based reports that provide lots of information you may
not have even realized was readily available. In short, you
can get an awful lot of strategic data for very little
effort.


Configuration

Let's walk through setting up a simple and common scenario:
We want to know how well our sales letter is converting web
site visitors to customers. Where Google Analytics shines is
how much valuable data it automatically gleans from such a
simple test.

Google calls a tracking scenario a "profile". Although you
can include URLs from many web sites in a single profile, it
is easiest if you organize things such that a profile is
fundamentally the same as a web site.

As part of setting up your profile, you provide the URLs of
all the pages for which you want data. Google then provides
you with a JavaScript snippet to include on each page. The
snippet is self-contained and requires no editing; it looks
like this:



You can put the snippet anywhere inside the tags of
your web pages.

Next, you want to specify a "goal". The goal in our case is
sales; we know that the goal has been achieved when the
customer reaches our "thank you" page, which we send them to
immediately following a purchase. Therefore the URL
associated with the goal is that of our thank you page. More
sophisticated goals can involve defining a "funnel" of
multiple pages; this can be extraordinarily useful in
identifying a weak spot in a more complicated sales process.


At this point our setup is finished! You then need to just
let your site run and accumulate statistics for at least 24
hours.



Reports

When you return and select View Reports, you will see an
amazing array of statistics at your disposal. The first
thing you'll notice is a pop-down menu with several roles,
namely Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster. Each role has a
suite of pre-cooked reports likely to be of interest to
someone in that role.

We'll focus on the Marketer role; when you choose this
option you'll see the Marketing Overview by default. It
includes four charts:

- A line graph showing raw page views over time
- A pie chart showing the proportion of returning versus new
visitors
- A world map showing the geographic distribution
of visitors
- A pie chart showing the visitor counts based on the referrer,
i.e. Google, Blogger.com (for my blog),
etc.



The Overview is general data useful for knowing the overall
populatiry of your site and where your visitors are coming
from.

The Marketing Summary report is a numerical chart that shows
the top five referrers, the top five keywords used by
searchers, and the top five campaigns. A campaign is
indicated by a code that you attach to a URL. Even so, by
default you get several campaign totals. These default
campaigns are:

- Organic: Indicates visitors referred by an unpaid search
engine listing.

- Referral: Indicates visitors referred by links which were
not tagged with any campaign variables.

- Not set: Indicates visitors referred by links which were
tagged with campaign variables but for which the campaign
variable was not set.

- Direct: Indicates visitors whotyped the URL directly into
the browser.

The next report of interest is Overall Keyword Conversion.
Since we have indicated a goal of "sales" and linked it to
our thank you page, the Overall Keyword Conversion report is
able to tell you which search engine keywords result in the
most sales. This is a really useful and potentially
profitable report.

The Campaign Conversion report shows which campaigns are
creating the most sales and the Conversion Summary produces
total visits and total goal percentages (i.e the number of
visitors that achieved each goal).

Finally, the Entrance Bounce Rate is an interesting report
that also has valuable data, even in our simple scenario: It
provides the list of pages for which customers land and
then leave right away. For some pages, our product download
page for example, we expect a 100% bounce rate. For others
it can illustrate a weak or problematic page.

Google Analytics provides an astonishing amount of data for
very little effort—and no cost (so far, anyway). Although
there a few advanced reports missing from its arsenal, it
makes the bulk of the web site measurement you'll want to do
very easy indeed.

Ross Lambert is The Midnight Marketer and the founder of
MidnightMarketer.com, an online community of internet
marketers (http://midnightmarketer.com). He is also the
author of Sonic Page Blaster (http://spbsavestime.com) and
Ross's Guide to the Masters of Marketing
(http://saleslettergenius.com).