Google Analytics

Formerly called Urchin....Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. Focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors. Google Analytics has the enterprise level capabilities you'd expect from a high end web analytics offering and also provides timesaving integration with AdWords. Of course, Google Analytics tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well.

The best news about Google’s offering is its price. It’s free.

Signing up is a simple process: name, email, website URL, etc. However, due to popularity, Google has experienced some delays in getting websites fully registered. Signing up requires a piece of JavaScript placed within the head section of web pages. This is similar to all other java based web based statistics programs.

Once that code is placed, Google will have to verify that it can see that code. Though their site says this will take 1-2 hours, it may take up to a day. Once Google recognises a website, it begins to collect data. Again, while their site states it may take 12 hours to gather the initial data, it took sa few days before I started to see any reporting.

The parameters for ALL reports are the date range. This is set by a calendar widget. The widget allows a user to set a daily date range or a month date range. Users can also set an hourly view, which displays the data by hour within a particular daily date range. The default setting is the daily date range.

In brief here are several reasons why a new webmaster should consider using Google Analytics:

- the power of old Urchin Tools
- for most webmasters, virtually unlimited hits/pageviews/visitors logged - this translates into more quality reporting
- integration with Adwords - ability to do  Return On Investment reporting etc.
- while the power may be overwhelming at first, the basic reports offer an opportunity to learn
- FREE. No other free web statistics program will provide this kind of power.

Contact Us For help with setting up your Google Analytics Account