Analytics – Gathering Statistics
Before you do anything Minuco recommend that you ensure you can understand how your site is operating. Minuco always recommend that you install some form of analytics program. Minuco generally use Google Analytics (a free service from Google – previously from Urchin) due to its wide range of functionality and it’s ease of use; to back up our recommendation we are happy to implement Google analytics for free onto anyone’s website – please contact us if you are interested.
An analytics program will tell you a range of basic and more complex statistics like how many people have accessed your site, it’s pages and sub sections, how users selected functionality like buttons, where the users came from (did they find the site from a search engine or were they directed from another site).
Once you have an analytics program installed on your site you can start to try different forms of marketing or SEO tweaks. Once these changes have been implemented you can measure the immediate effects of these changes. This will allow you to direct your budget against programs and campaigns that work in the way you anticipated them working rather than guessing whether they are working.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at Marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew.
GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
Integrated with AdWords, users can optimize online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.
GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.
Users can officially add up to 50 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to one website.