2.9 Google Analytics

What is google analytics ?

Google analytics is a web analytics tool that helps you understand how people use your website and what they do after they leave your site. Google Analytics gives you insights into your website traffic and conversion rates, as well as the performance of your advertising campaigns. Google Analytics is the standard by which all other analytics tools are measured.

Why is Google Analytics so important ?

• Google Analytics helps you improve your performance.
• If you make sure that you've got an optimized site, you can get a higher traffic and higher conversion rate.
• Google Analytics is very useful for SEO.
• Google Analytics is a very good tool for analyzing your website traffic and conversions.
• Google Analytics can be used by many different businesses as a tool to track the performance of their websites.

How does Google Analytics Work ?

Google Analytics uses a lot of the same basic tracking metrics as AdWords. For the most part, however, AdWords is far more sophisticated than Google Analytics for tracking performance.

There are a number of different types of Google Analytics reports available, and they differ in how they are reported and how they display different types of data.

What is a Google Analytics report ?

An Analytics report is a report produced by the Google Analytics platform. Google Analytics reports typically include information that can be helpful to a website owner in identifying trends and measuring the performance of their online site. Reports can also be used to create custom dashboards.

What is the purpose of an analytics report ?

The purpose of an analytics report is to provide data to website owners in the form of a report to analyze or monitor your site. The data in an analytics report can include information such as the following:

• User Activity
• What type of activities are occurring on your website?
• Are you seeing a lot of page views?
• What types of pages are being viewed?

Google Analytics Set Up

Follow these easy steps to set-up your Google Analytics :

• Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Add your site to the Google Analytics Console
• Google Analytics will not function unless your site is included in the Google Analytics API. To include your site in the API you can use the gacloud api url http://gacloud.googleapis.com/analytics-api-v2/
• Setup Google Analytics Reporting
• Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/devtools/reports/
• Click the New Report button
• Use the "Add a Report" button and select the Google Analytics Tracking ID from the dropdown.
• Google Analytics will provide a URL that you will need to enter in the URL field in the Google Analytics Console
• Create and Export Reports
• Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/devtools/reports/
• Create a new report by clicking the New Report

Understanding Overview Analytics Report

It is important to understand that Google Analytics is used to monitor the success of your online businesses. The main use of Google Analytics is in measuring your business' conversion rate. If you are running a business that sells online, this is one of the key factors that can make or break you.

However, sometimes it can produce an overwhelming amount of data, making it difficult to know what reports to look at, or how to understand what that data is telling you. Well, below is a breakdown of the important reports you should be looking at to improve your website.

• The left side bar:
  This is where you find all the different sets of data and reports to run.

• Data Range:
  This determines the date range of the data you are looking at.

• Email:
  This will allow you to e-mail the report you have to anyone you would like.

• Export:
  This is where you can export the data you are looking at.

• Segments:
  This is used to compare different sets of data.

• Graph:
  The graph automatically plots your sessions.

• Sessions:
  This represents the number of times a user was active on your website.

• Users:
  This represents the number of people who have come to your site.

• Page Views:
  This represents the total number of pages that were viewed on your website.

• Bounce Rate:
  This is the percentage of users who only visit one page of your website and leave.

How to monitor your traffic ? 

Monitoring your website traffic using Google Analytics can be done using very easy steps. They are :

• Signup for Google analytics
• Find your Analytics tracking ID
• Open a site in new Google Sites
• Click More Site Analytics
• Enter a valid tracking ID
• Click Save

To see your data :

• Open Analytics
• View your data

What are backlinks?

In short, backlinks are the links that refer back to a site. In other words, the link that takes you to a particular website. In order to get a link, a site has to get someone to click on a particular link and read the article. Backlinks are the most important factor in determining a website's ranking. They play a very important role in Google analytics.

How to Find Backlinks :

In order to search for backlinks, you'll first have to create a blog that you're going to publish and which you can rank on. Then, in order to create and publish a blog post, you'll need to write an article that will include links to a variety of relevant sites.

Once you've done that, link to all the relevant sites, and link to other relevant websites. It's best if you link to all the relevant websites as opposed to just one or two websites.