Google Analytics

For most bloggers, website developers, and internet marketers, Google Analytics is a basic necessity for ranking highly. Yet many people (especially those that are new to making profits on the internet) overlook this simple yet crucial step. 

Micro Niche Finder will help you find a suitable niche for your needs, but once you set up a website or blog, Google Analytics will tell you where the traffic coming to your website originates from. It’s one way to check the success of your site and it’s a great way to tweak your campaign where necessary.

When you add the Google Analytics JavaScript code to your site, Google anonymously collects information about how people are directed to your site, how long they remain on the site, what pages on your site are viewed most, what countries your visitors are coming from, and whether any conversion goals have been achieved.

The data collected by this code is updated many times throughout the day, giving you a very accurate idea of the traffic coming to your website. Types of traffic that Analytics uses are direct traffic, organic referrals, tagged campaign links, and un-tagged referral links.  Google Analytics is a thorough tool, and even links embedded in a .pdf file can be traced (which is great if you distribute or sell ebooks).

 The sites that brought your viewers/customers to your site is very important  - for instance, you may only have a 20% direct traffic rate, but 40% of your traffic could be coming from a website such as ezinearticles.com. Once you realize that ezinearticles is responsible for a large portion of your traffic, you may want to add more articles to ezinearticles. If you see that another website isn’t providing you the traffic you expected, you can either choose to not spend so much effort on deriving traffic from that site OR you can resolve to get more traffic from that site by changing your advertising strategy.

There are some limitations for using Google Analytics however – it is only available for websites that receive less than 5 million page views per month. Websites with more than 5 million page views can only use Google Analytics if the site is linked to an AdWords campaign. Some programs, such as Firefox’s NoScript, can accidentally block the Google Analytics tracking code. Analytics is not easily accessed or put into place on most telephones, except for the newest models (including smart phones and PDAs). In time all phone will be able to run and read the tracking code, but since it is JavaScript, most phone support for this technology isn’t quite there yet.

If you have a Google/Gmail account, you are already able to access Google Analytics. If you don’t have an account with Google, you will need to create one – it’s as easy as making a new gmail account. Once you are logged in, go to Google’s homepage and click on the text beneath the search box titled “Business Solutions”. This will take you to a new page with lots of features – click on the one that says “Analytics” under the “Enhance Your Website” category. Click through to “access analytics” and you should come to a screen that has your websites with all of their demographic and marketing information collected for you to investigate.

If you have never set up a website on Google’s Analytics before, it’s very simple. To start, look in the top right part of your screen – there should be a drop-down box preceded by “My Analytics Accounts”. Click on the box and choose the “Create New Account” option. Google walks you through it from there, and it’s not difficult at all. You can create up to 50 Analytics accounts per Google account, so feel free to repeat this process for other websites of yours you want to track!