what is google analytics and why you should use it on your websites…

Google Analytics is free service and a web product from Google that provides you with detailed stats about your website performance and website visitors. It tracks many useful website statistics such as the traffic referrers, traffic sources and page views. It also shows you visitor stats such as the time spent on website, number of pages visited per visit, location of the visitor and site speed among many other stats.

It also has a tight integration with other related Google products such Google Adwords, Google Adsense and Google webmaster tools. If you use Google Adwords or Adsense then it is good way to evaluate  the impact of your marketing efforts with the actual visitor and website data.

You can also track the website navigation patterns of the users along with various customizable events so that you can streamline and make your website better and more efficient. It also provides you with highly customized reporting and data visualization tools which should help you make sense of the data.

There are many reasons why you might want to use analytics data for your website. Different types of websites use the data for different purposes. Depending on your website, you could use it for any of the following purposes.

  1. Adword Marketing : Tighter integration with Adwords provides you with statistics to optimize your keywords and keyphrases better.
  2. Online Marketing : If you use any other methods of marketing other than Adwords, such as email, rss or link generation then it provides a good way to track and compare the various methods.
  3. Offline Marketing : Website and Visitor data provides valuable information about how your marketing efforts are working. This allows you to further optimize those marketing efforts.
  4. Website Speed : You can track how well the website is performing and optimize the speed to make it faster.
  5. Page Views : You can track your best performing blog post or web pages. Also, track the worst performing posts.
Screenshot of GA Custom report

All your tracking data is hosted on Google servers which makes it easily accessible anywhere and everywhere.

Google Analytics collects and tracks the website data using JavaScript and cookies. This necessities that you or the webmaster insert the appropriate code into all the webpages in the website that you want to track. This code and service is provided free for almost all websites. There is a limit on websites which generate more 10 million hits a month. Google Analytics is currently used by roughly about 50% of all websites.

Google recently rolled out a premium version of the Analytics that you can use for large enterprises for a fee.