Google Analytics - It’s a lot of data but what good is it?

For many of us, and certainly most geeks, data is intrinsically interesting. It’s easy to spend an hour wandering around Google Analytics’ reports of a website thinking Wow! Isn’t that interesting.

By kath

For many of us, and certainly most geeks, data is intrinsically interesting.  It’s easy to spend an hour wandering around Google Analytics’ reports of a website thinking Wow! Isn’t that interesting.

It’s also easy at the end of the hour to stop and think - after all that, what should I do differently?  And not to have an answer

Uncustomised, Google analytics helps to answer a couple of main questions

- how are people finding my site?
- what are they doing there?

While a static look at the analytics might be interesting, answers are found by looking at changes over time.  After-all the best benchmark for your site is itself.  If you’re putting some effort into SEO - is search traffic improving?  If you’ve built a new page - is anyone looking at it?  If you’ve revamped the site - have bounce rates gone down? Time on site/pages viewed gone up?

Analytics can also help you to decide how to improve your site - I have limited space on the homepage and I want to add something, what is least important to my visitors at the moment that I can remove?

But customisation releases the true power of Analytics.
If it’s an ecommerce site, then adding tracking for expenditure enables me to see who is spending money to understand my buying cycle.

Even for non ecommerce sites, often there is a goal for the site - like signing up for an email list, or a pdf download, that you are trying to optimise for.  Setting up goals to track these can be highly beneficial.

So don’t just browse your analytics reports for interests sake, start with the questions that you want answered.  If you can’t find the answers maybe customisation would be able to help you.