Google Analytics can be a very powerful tool if used correctly. These last few weeks I have been working on a clients website and digging through the stats to only find that their Analytics account wasn’t actually telling me a whole lot about their site, and what the users were doing on their site.
I have began evaluating their SEO efforts and PPC campaigns, to find which keywords are more effectively targeted with their online advertising budget. When they originally set up their analytics account it wasn’t properly setup, this either being the urls structures, or setting up the wrong goals, or simply sending traffic to their own sub-domain and not setting up a filter to tell Analytics that they are actually the same site. At the end of the day the stats are all gibberish and don’t show our ROI per keyword.
I want to share a few resources that I have found over these 2 weeks to help me better understand how to use Google Analytics to your sites advantage. ROIRevolution.com offers a free webinar that has some great tips and understanding on how to better understand the potential benefits of Analytics. They also offer a free 7 day mini course that I highly recommend. Of course this site also sales packages on Analytics training that are a little more advanced than the basic setup of Analytics.
Google Analytics can be very complex if you want it to be. As you will see in this post and this one, there are a number of hacks that can be applied to help you in further understanding what is happening on your site. If you have the know how and can filter your data properly, your analytics reports can become invaluable. Analytics should become a large part of your websites strategy, as you’ll see in these posts here and here. Aweber which in my opinion is the #1 email delivery service available has some great information and how to track your visitors through your email campaigns using Google Analytics.
Unfortunately I don’t have all the expertise on Analytics as I wish I did. I will be going through the ROI Revolution training course sometime in the short future, as I understand the value that it provides. But it is only valuable to those who can take the data and turn it into actionable items for your website strategy.
