Google Analytics - Find out everything about your vistors
Google offers a free service called Google Analytics or GA. It helps people to generate detailed statistics about the web surfers that visit their web site. What makes it so popular is that a web master is able to optimize Adwords advertisement and marketing campaigns with the use of Google Analysis. This shows them where the site’s visitors came from, how long they were on the web site and where they are located geographically. The people who sign up with Google Analytics can define and track conversions or goals. These goals can include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page and downloading a particular file. With this tool, marketers can see which ads are performing the best and which aren’t doing so good. The chance of finding an unexpected source of quality visitors is also possible.
Google Analytics was created by Urchin Software Corporation’s analytics system called Urchin on Demand, which was acquired by Google in April of 2005. To this day, Google still sells the Urchin Software Corp installation through a network of value-added resellers. Previous customers of Urchin have complained about the support and development of the standalone product. A new release entered into beta testing in Oct. 2007. This new system also brings ideas from Adaptive Path (its product Measure Map was acquired and renamed by Google Analytics in 2006). This version was brought out in November of 2005 and was available to anyone who wanted to sign up. The high demand of subscriptions that followed caused new sign up services to become suspended after a few days of being on the market.
Once capacity was added to the system, Google started a lottery type invitation code model. Just before August 2006, Google began sending out these invitation codes in batches as server availability permitted. Since then, the service has been generally available. In May of 2007, a new version of the user interface was released. With this, subscribers were able to create up to 50 site profiles; and each profile generally corresponds to one web site. If someone wants more than 50 profiles, a new account can be created.
Google Analytics wanted to try a dashboard type approach for the casual user, giving subscribers in-depth data further into the report set. To this day, there are over 80 distinct reports, which are customizable to some level of degree. Users are also able to integrate Google Adwords with Google Analytics. With this integration, subscribers can see performance of ad group keywords in their reports. Other advanced features are also available, including visitor segmentation and custom fields.
On each page the subscriber wishes to track, JavaScript is included within it (started by Google Analytics). With the JavaScript on the page, larger files are able to load from the Google web server and sets variables with the subscriber’s account number. With the script on the page, there are checks for its presence on a tracked site’s homepage and when there is no presence detected, a warning is given. Not all users have JavaScript enabled browsers. This can limit the further tracking of Urchin’s ability.