Why You Should Be Using Google Analytics!

Mike Finley

Looks like my account got upgraded.

All I can say is WOW!

The new version is amazing to say the least. I thought the old one was just okay, always seemed very hard to mine any real relevant info, but this new version, WOW!

It's like a dream. I'm still poking around, but just after 5 minutes I'm blown away at how big of an improvement this is. They took it from a Ford Escort to a Ferrari in one giant step!

I'd actually pay for this version. Don't tell Google that!

Nathan

Yea, it's grown on me quite a bit. I use the program every day so at first it was a shock but now that i'm used to it I love it.

I like how you can customize the dashboard by adding and removing reports and dragging them around on the page.

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Nathan

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

Mike Finley

So how are they able to pin point visitors to your site down to their individual city? I thought you used to see like 6,000 visits from Virginia because they were logged on to the Internet through AOL?

Nathan

IP addresses are kind of like phone numbers. You can find a persons location by looking at the IP sort of like you could tell I'm in Austin because I have a (512) area code. It's more complex than just one set of numbeers but that is how they can tell.

I can also tell what part of the country someone is in when they post on this site by looking at their IP addresses. Sometimes this helps to find bogus posters.

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Nathan

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

TridentOps

I dont remeber exactly, but they said they were able to cross reference other info from their Adsense data to narrow down more exact locations within the city. I used to see a majority of my hits from Irvine because sbc & verizon have some net router there I guess.

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Trident Construction Management
Remodeling, Landscape and Water Features

Micvanlen

Interesting thread.

WestCoastVinyl

Something to note, you should always be thinking tracking those numbers. What gave you the traffic and is it converting?

msteinhoff

I've been using Google Analytics for a couple years now. I like it because, unlike local stats programs, advertisers believe Google Analytics. They see it as definitive and with a consistent report. Analytics also gives you a heck of a lot of information for the low, low price of free. I track 30-some-odd domains using Google Analytics.

On the other hand, Google Analytics is not able to provide a full and complete picture of your web traffic. It can only count pages where the JavaScript tracking code is executed.

While browsers with JavaScript disabled are rare, image hot-linking or linking directly to PDFs or other documents are very common. That traffic will not be represented in the Google Analytics data.

I use Webalizer to monitor the Apache server web logs for anomolies that I can't see in the Google Analytics data.

For example, a month ago, I was noticing a lot of bandwidth being used around the clock but very little increase in the number of visits.
Someone hotlinked an image from one of my web sites to a very popular message base. That one 180k image had been downloaded 1.3 million times. Ouch! Thanks to the Apache referral logs, I was able to locate the message base and then block off-site linking.

Cheers,
Matt

MOTB

It is important to focus on getting traffic to your site, but it is also important to ensure you see what happens AFTER people have made it to your site. In my situation I care most about someone making it to the registration page to my product. Most contractors are probably looking to be contacted with a request for quote, etc. Each of your webpages should always make it easy for the prospect to contact you next, no matter what. Then you can begin to study the differences of how many people you need to attract to your site to convert them into contacting you. Brian

WestCoastVinyl

I think one problem that most people have a problem with is if their website is huge they don't know how to implement ga on their websites. The basics is cover all the pages, and start looking into the split testing certain pages. West Coast Vinyl

Sunrooms

the trouble i have with is is that it can not read the clicks on the buttons that are flash

zookies

The only tracking I am doing is google analytics, although Microsoft (now called Bing) is adding webmaster tools and I am exploring that. We have cut back on adwords to less than $ 100 per month, and are generating $ 250k a month in closed leads with organic, repeat customers, and we are using angies', home reports, kudzu. We just dropped out of yelp. We are reaching a point where organic search engine traffic and closed leads is our number one lead generator.

polljimmy

Hey, Its very nice information.
Google Analytics enables you to understand how visitors interact with your website. Google Analytics also helps you to identify navigational components that promote or inhibit conversions to sales, enabling you to optimize ad campaigns and website content for increased sales.
As a Google Checkout merchant, you can use Google Analytics to track buyers who leave your site to complete an order using Google Checkout.