Google Analytics help for beginners – what is Google Analytics, how to use Google Analytics, how to get Google Analytics working on your websites, and Google Analytics help interpreting your results.
Google Analytics – if you’re exploring internet-based business of any kind, it is inevitable that at some point you will be told to use Google Analytics.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is basically a tracking system for internet traffic, that is, visitors to web sites.
If given access to the website, Google can record a lot of information about the people who visit that site – where they are located, how they reached the website, which page they looked at first, how they navigated around the website, from which page they exited the website, how many pages they viewed, how long they spent viewing the pages, and even what words they typed into a search engine, if they came to the website from a search engine.
As you can imagine, this is priceless information for the website owner.
Google Analytics is free, which is great when you are just starting out online, and it is fairly easy to install.
Even if you don’t own the website directly – say, for example you are writing lenses on Squidoo, or Hubs on HubPages, or a blog on Blogger.com – many of these platforms support Google Analytics and encourage their users to track visitors using Google Analytics.
On their blog, Chris and Jenny Ford offer a full array of Google Analytics help for beginners.
You can use the Google Analytics goal tracking function to measure how many visitors to your site are taking the action you plan for them to take. This action may be buying a product, subscribing to a service, or opting in to your email list.
You tell Google Analytics the sequence of pages your visitors travel in order to accomplish your desired goal. Google Analytics will then track the number of visitors who complete the sequence, and if you hit “View Report”, Google Analytics will show you the percentage of visitors who dropped off the goal path at each step.
As you can imagine, this is the kind of information direct marketers adore, because it will show you exactly where you need to re-work the text on your page to make the largest improvement in your conversion rate.
If your website makes money through pay-per-click or other forms of advertising, and you are not actively building a list of subscribers, then you will not need to set up a goal path.
Read the full Google Analytics help article on Google Analytics help for beginners.
