Once a business has established a blog or website the representative responsible for its maintenance, will usually hear one question over and over again. Everyone from the CEO or owner to the receptionist wants to know how many visitors are coming in everyday? This question of how popular the blog is haunts every business, because how else can they know the value of the blog.
Learning to read the site’s stats can seem like a job unto itself, but one of the largest search engines has made it a little easier not only to read the stats, but improve on them as well. Google Analytics can show you who all are coming to your site and how to reach out and find even more potential visitors.
So, what is Google Analytics, anyway?
Google Analytics which is often abbreviated as GA, is a service offered for free by Google. It generates very detailed statistics about how visitors are viewing a website. Google Analytics is actually geared and directed to marketers and not webmasters or the hobby web host. This means that by using certain aspects of GA, like AdWords a business can review online marketing, which will show them whether an ad is performing well or not.
What can Google Analytics show the business about visitors?
The format of Google Analytics shows information in a dashboard type layout that is very easy for anyone to read and follow. This is good news for the blog writer in that difficult analysis which could otherwise take days to compile is ready through Google, usually within 24 hours. This gives the business a real plus in having very quick information about what is working and what is not gaining attention from visitors.
Pages that are performing poorly can easily be identified. It also shows where visitors are coming from as ‘referrers’, which means knowing about another site, which held the visitor’s interest. There is also information about the geographical position of the visitor. This is data that should be collected and looked at carefully later.
A business might find it very useful to know that there are more visitors just outside of town or a few miles away than just down the block, for instance. There is also information on where the visitor went on the site and how long they stayed there. This can be very useful since if you have a data rich, heavily contented area yet visitors are only spending a few seconds there you can discern they are not actually reading this material.
