Last time I went over a few tools in the Adwords interface that will help you when building a campaign and testing it once it is live. Google Analytics is the free tool that deals with statistic about your website’s traffic and where the traffic is coming from.
The tool provides you with a wide range of metrics such as clicks, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rate etc. All of these will be useful when determining how well your advertising campaigns are performing once the user clicks onto your site and the best thing about this tool is that it is absolutely free. The lesson to take away from this is that if you are not using Google Analytics for your website you should be.
To sign up to this tool you will need to go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up to the service. This will give you access to a ton of information about your site that you can use to improve the way users interact with your offering.
Google Analytics can track users from all sources to your site. These include search engines like Google or Bing, social networks like Facebook or Google+, direct visits to the site which is where someone types in your web address directly into the browser, referring sites such as ones who are advertising for you and email marketing. This describes only a few of the different sources that you will be able to see the traffic from and judge how well it is performing.
As you can see from the screenshot the dashboard of Google Analytics is similar in design to Adwords with a trend graph in the centre providing you with an overview of how performance is looking. This should help you navigate around since it works in a similar way.
Some of the highlights of the tool are that it can provide real-time reporting which can be very useful to track how the performance of your site is doing especially during a promotion when you need to know the impact of various marketing activities. Another feature is the content analytics which lets you understand which parts of your website are performing well and which pages are the most popular so that you can use this to update your site to provide a better user experience. When you aren’t using it to improve the experience on your website you can use it to track conversions or sales if you are selling a product or service on your site. If it is set up correctly you can even track how much revenue is being generated by the traffic from the various sources.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what Google Analytics is you may want to take some time to learn a bit more about the tool and how best to use it. Google makes the information about how to do this easily accessible online with the Analytics Academy. This is a free online learning platform that offers training in the tool and data analysis and you can also use it to prepare for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification if you want to really take your knowledge to the next level.
You can find all this information available here and this area allows you to view lessons from experts, test your knowledge and join the learning community that Google has setup.
You can find out more about Google Analytics here and you can sign up to it quite easily. The trick will be taking into account all the data that it lets you view and using it to support your website in a positive way.
Read my other search-related blog posts:
1 : An Introduction to Paid Search Traffic and Adwords
2 : Adwords Campaigns and Keywords
3 : Keywords: Which is the right match type for you?
4 : Creative: why this is important?
