This is the first of my “Push Your Presence” series where I explain certain tools and techniques that you can use to establish and create a presence for your website or business in virtual real estate. And for the first post, I’m going to talk about a free and incredibly useful tool that Google provides to analyze and track the progress of your website.
Google Analytics is a package of tools the search giant provides for free that allows website owners to track incoming traffic to their sites. It can show you where the traffic comes from, which links were used to get to your website, and which pages viewers read the most when they’re on your site. All of this information is then packaged into clean and convenient charts, graphs, and other interactive displays. Analytics can also track social media waves that you create, allowing you to see what viewers used most, such as Google+, Facebook, etc. You can also set goals for your website, which is crucial because every budding site will need certain milestones to measure its success and Analytics provides a way of doing this. On top of all this, Google even gives certain tips on how to retain viewers through this service.
The true beauty of Google Analytics shines through in how you can use these incredible tools to market to and pull viewers. Here’s an example: imagine that you just created your site and you’re eager to push traffic to it and test your market. You picked your target demographics and start throwing up links to your site on a variety of other sites that you think your target viewers visit. Now, you sit back and wait for the people to trickle in. Hopefully people start visiting and traffic really picks up. Enter, Analytics. Using Google Analytics, you start searching out which links people use when coming in and juxtapose them against which viewers stay the longest. As you start seeing trends, you will begin to understand more about your true target viewers. Once you know your market, you can stop wasting time and money targeting websites that don’t bring your target viewers in. Narrowing your focus will help you understand which content your viewers like, subsequently allowing you to shed unnecessary pages as well as ads (if you’ve been marketing). Because Analytics also tracks social media movements, you can also use it to help you infer which social media channels that you want to focus your SM campaigns on. If people “liked” your site more than “+ed” it, consider scaling up your Facebook presence and push content there. Or if they shared certain content more, figure out what sets it apart from the rest and push more of it.
Google also offers a premium Analytics package which targets bigger enterprises with more data, tools, and support for an annual, flat-rate fee.
There are a plethora of other services that Analytics provides, such as advertisement support, but I just wanted to keep this post simple and give you an idea of the potential and power of this great tool.
-Shaun
Source: google.com/analytics
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