Useful Analytics Data

Google, the giant of search (and data storage), has yet again stored enough data to provide valuable input.

The useful tool: Google Analytics.

But that’s just a statistics tool, right? – Wrong.

Google Analytics isn’t as Anal as the name might lead you to believe.
The statistics logged are very detailed, in fact, I use it on a few sites, and I know exactly where the majority of users have come from, yes, even in Australia, those of you in Applecross (and provide a staggering 130 visits to OzVoIPStatus) know full well what I am talking about :).. That’s pretty good logging of data. Heck, Applecross just used to seem like some little, tiny, low populated suburb somewhere near Perth to me previously..

.. But it’s right on the map on Google Analytics for OzVoIPStatus.

That’s not what I used it for this time though, OzVoIPStatus is Not For Profit.

What it was used for, is something for profit.

A person I know who leverages the power of the intanetz has a marketing campaign running on Google Adwords. His campaign was great at the start, dipped down, started struggling to keep afloat, took a huge leap up to the top, and slipped back down to a silent level, and was paused.

At that same point in time, I added tracking for Google Analytics to the pages, and tracked conversions, among other things, where on Google Earth those visitors were coming from…

.. and that data comes in use now.

You see, the marketing contact of mine wants to run a nice, huge, glossy, squished down, Son-of-mac style, newspaper ad, in the US, to drive traffic to his website from … those who might not be looking at Google to find his website.

But where do we advertise. He has a limited budget to plaster his.. huge, but squashed newspaper advert?

So, we can now dig into Analytics statistics and simply Google.. where do we run our newspaper ad. And Google should respond with California, Florida, and a few others that might be key targets for marketing.

Google Analytics absolutely kicks ass, you won’t find it much useful at the start (well, no point just knowing how many visitors you get in 3 hours if those visitors just click and leave), you get the more useful stats after its ran for a long time. After its had a chance to sense the internet’s traffic to your website. You start to see traffic rising like an old man with a young woman and a popular pill.

If you have a website, and you might see yourself needing some idea of where visitors come from or what they do (howdy to those visitors in Ingle Farm, SA), you need Google Analytics. At some point, it’ll provide some useful information, and if it doesn’t, it serves as a great free traffic counter, with stats on how many people come back again to how many are new visitors (around 50%), as well as average pages per visit, and total visits and total pageviews.

Very much useful.