Google Analytics, a short introduction to web traffic analysis

Every webmaster out there is most interested in two things when it comes to his websites: it they’re up and running and how much visitors are they getting. Even project managers, who’s primary purpose is to make profit from a website are concerned about web traffic so that they better understand who’s visiting the website and how can they turn even more profit from that.

Google Analytics is one of the best ways to monitor your visitors, plus it has the advantages of being free. In this post I’m going to present the main functions of Google Analytics, how it works and what are the main concepts of web traffic analysis.

How Google Analytics or any other web monitoring service works

First you have to sign up for a Google Account, if you don’t already have one, login to Google Analytics, and create a new website profile. The code that’s being given to you has to be inserted on every page of the website you’re monitoring. Google recommends you put it in the footer, so it loads after the whole page, giving you better statistics as it doesn’t include users that get bored and close the page before it loads completely in their browsers.

After Google Analytics validates the code you’ve inserted into your website’s pages you have to wait a few hours till stats gather up and then you can start learning more about your visitors. The stats are gathered thanks to the code mentioned earlier that registers data about every user loading a page from your site. This data includes, but it’s not limited to IP, Operating System, browser type, screen resolution, time on page or page impressions.

What are the main concepts of web analysis

Even if different monitoring systems give different numbers that has to do with the data gathering methodology, the way information is processed, the code placement and so on. Although, there are a few common metrics that are widely defined the same way, so here’s a list of them:

• A visitor: is a person that enters your website in a given amount of time. Same person can make multiple visits to your website the same day.
• An unique visitor: is an unique person that visits your website throughout the period you’re getting the metrics.
• A page impression (or pageview): any page loaded from your website is called a page impression. The same page can be loaded multiple times in a period of time and is counted every time it refreshes.
• Bounce rate: the percentage of people that exit your website from a page without loading another one from the same domain.
• Time on site: is counted as the average time a visitor spends on your website during a visit.
• Time on page: same as above but refers to time spent on a single page.
• New visits: this is the percentage of new people that have never visited your website before.
• Referral: is the domain/site/service previously visited by an user, which pointed him to your website through a link.

What are the main statistics provided by Google Analytics

Once you select a website in your Google Analytics profile to see its stats there are 5 important types of statistics you can browse, and those are:

1  – Dashboard

Hare you can see the main stats of your website. It defaults to past 30 days (not included current day) but this period can be set in the upper right part to any date interval. The main metrics are easily displayed here: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, time on site and new visits. You can also see a top of your most visited pages, referral sources and geographical location of your visitors.

Google Analytics Dashboard: where it all begins

2 – Visitors

Here you’ll learn about your visitors geographical location, screen resolution, operating system and browser used, connection speed, language used by their system, loyalty (number of times they visited your website in a given period) and so on.

All about your visitors

3 – Traffic sources

This is the tab that tells you where your visitors come from (referring sites), which keywords they used in search engines to get to your pages. The keywords tab is a very important piece of information to better understand what your visitors are interested in, so you can better cover those topics in the future. Also you can understand which pages you need to push in Search Engines to get better traffic on them.

See who sent traffic to you

4 – Content

It’s the place where you see what are your most visited pages, entrance paths to those pages, the referring source and bounce rate for every page and site overlay, a function that shows you where people clicked on any of your pages, so you can better understand how they navigate in your website. Top exit pages (pages where the most users left your website) are also monitored here so you’ll know which pages are the worst in the eyes of your visitors.

Most visited pages are displayed here

5 – Goals

This is a more advanced area of your Google Analytics stats. Before info shows here you have to set up goals in your site: set up visiting patterns that start with one page and lead to an end page. You set up also an amount of earnings for each successfully completed goal. This is an useful part of GA that can be used by online stores to record the number of people that had put products in their basket and then completed the checkout process.

I tried to keep this guide about what is and how Google Analytics can be used in your interest to monitor and analyze your websites from traffic and visitors point of view. Hope you like it. If you have any questions post them below in comments.