What Google Analytics can do for you

If you have a website and want to make it more popular and successful then what Google Analytics can do will amaze you! Here are some of my favorite things what Google Analytics has done to help my online businesses.

The nice thing about Google Analytics is that you can add all of your websites and blogs to your Google Analytics. What Google Analytics can then do is to show you really detailed statistics for all of your websites.

As well as putting your own websites into Google Analytics you can also track your own Hubpages and any pages you have written for other revenue sharing article sites such as InfoBarrel.

What Google Analytics can show you is basic reports such as:

• Number of website visitors
• What the most popular pages are in your website
• Whether traffic to your site is increasing or decreasing
• What keywords users searched for to find your site in search engines.
• What pages visitors entered and exited your website from.
• Which websites sent your website the most visitors.

Once you have taken a look at the basic Google Analytics reports for your website, then next process is to put all of your websites into Google Analytics. If you use AdSense, AdWords or have an ecommerce website then you can also try integrating Google Analytics with these. You'll then get even more valuable reports in Google Analytics.

Once you've signed up for free with Google Analytics you need to put the tracking code on your pages. The tracking code is a piece of JavaScript that reports to Google all kinds of information about your website's visitors.

The tracking code needs to go near the bottom of your page's HTML code. This is easier to do if your website uses a template. It's also possible to add Google Analytics to a Blog - there are pages that show you how to add your tracking code to Blogs running on blogger or blogspot.

If your website uses AdSense then you sometimes have to put an extra piece of tracking JavaScript code at the top of your web pages.

When I first started off writing on Hubpages I used to use AdSense URL Channels to monitor the AdSense performance of my Hubs. However, I found out that I quickly ran out of URL Channels. Google only give you 200 Channels to start off with. I think you can request more, but I don't know how many more channels Google will give you.

Even with more URL channels, it eventually becomes quite hard work managing vast numbers of URL Channels in the AdSense site.

What Google Analytics can offer is a much better alternative to using AdSense URL Channels. Google Analytics is not limited to monitoring 200 pages.

Google are gradually integrating all their different services. There is now great integration between Google Analytics and AdWords. When you link your Analytics account to your AdWords account you can check Google Analytics to see exactly which AdWord campaigns and keywords are bringing in the customers.

Link Google Analytics to your ecommerce provider and you can start to do some really clever analysis like work out how much to spend on AdWords in order to make a lot more money from your ecommerce store.

If you've written an eBook and put it on sale in the ClickBank Marketplace then Google Analytics can be used to track sales by using the Goals feature of Analytics. I've found this to be one of the best features of Google Analytics and it works really well. I now know exactly the kind of marketing that sells eBooks, which means I can easily do more of the same type of marketing in order to increase ClickBank sales of my eBooks.

Google Analytics can even perform advanced marketing techniques such as A/B testing of alternative sales squeeze pages. This is a great way to increase your squeeze page conversion rates.

Unfortunately I think it's less easy to set up Google Analytics to track affiliate products you've found on CBMall and the ClickBank Marketplace. An alternative way to track these sales is to use the ClickBank optional Tracking ID which appends a code to the browser's Query String. These Tracking IDs then show up in ClickBank's Affiliate Analytics system.

A number of different Ecommerce solutions offer integration with Google Analytics. What Google Analytics can help you with is to find out exactly why customers bought products through your website.

Some ecommerce products only have simple Google Analytics support. What Google Analytics can do with the more sophisticated ecommerce solutions is really impressive.

Sadly my software website uses RegNow as the payment processor, and their Google Analytics support is very basic. What I'd like to do is to move my ecommerce order processing to a payment processing company such as Avangate. This payment processor is great because they support the advanced ecommerce facilities that Google Analytics offers. It's possible to track each individual product you sell so that Google Analytics reports then show you exactly what is selling. This data can help by:

• Showing which products sell at certain time periods. The Google Analytics date spanning feature is great for generating reports for specific time frames. This is especially useful for companies that have strange financial reporting periods.
• Shows which sites are sending the most customers to your site. This is important! What Google Analytics can show with ecommerce integration is the sites that are sending you the most customers who bought things, rather than just the number of referals. An important aspect of Internet marketing is that Internet traffic has different levels of QUALITY. Quality traffic leads to higher levels of sales! If you see that some refering sites are sending high quality traffic then it's well worth seeing if you can get more links to your site from that site, or increasing your advertising budget on that site. Conversely you can stop advertising on sites that aren't sending you customers that buy products.
• Show which products are making you the most money. What Google Analytics can do is to assign a monetary value to each product, so it can then work out how much money each product is making. The nice thing about Google Analytics is that it can even assign a monetary value to each visit and page on your site.

I hope this article shows you just some of the useful things what can be achieved with Google Analytics on your websites. If you're into Internet Marketing, then what Google Analytics can achieve will amaze you!