With Twitter you can follow people, with Facebook you can friend people, with LinkedIn you can recommend people. Feeling followed? Just by surfing around the Internet, you are being followed. You are being tracked. Every single click you make is being tracked, analyzed and you are the victim of the monitoring society. Scared?

Well, if you are an analyst or just an internetsurfer, you can read this, and I’ll try to give you some of the most common reasons why we are being tracked and analyzed out there, and what you can use it for. I’ll base this article on Google Analytics which is an amazing analysis tool with lots of features and capabilities.

What’s Google Analytics?

The Google-branded version was rolled-out in November 2005 to anyone who wished to sign up. However due to extremely high demand for the service, new sign-ups were suspended only a week later. As capacity was added to the system, Google began using a lottery-type invitation-code model. Prior to August 2006 Google was sending out batches of invitation codes as server availability permitted; since mid-August 2006 the service has been fully available to all users – whether they use Google for advertising or not. A new version of the user interface was released on May 17, 2007.[3]
‘ wikipedia.org

In my words Google Analytics is the best free web analytics. It’s quite popular, because it is free, it is very easy to use and it is a professional tool, not just another free counter for your notorious website.

In this article i will not explain how much about how to use Google Analytics. I will leave that to Google themself.

The main features of Google Analytics

So why is Google Analytics such a great web analytics tool? Because it has some very useful features. With Google Analytics you can…

Gather information about what happens on your website and bechmark the effects.

Very useful. But how can I bechmark the effects and see what happens?
I’ve divided the features into two layers. First layer, the simple data, is the cool facts about your visitors:

1. Layer (simple data)

• Daily visitors
• Avarage conversion rate (sales, downloads, ect.)
• Avarage time on site
• How often the visitors come back
• Do visitors stay on your site? (single page visit?)
• Top visited pages
• Geographic distribution of visitors
• What language they are using
• What operating system, browser, screen size they are using.

The next layer is a little more complicated. But as with the datas from the first layer, you can also measure these data from the second layer with Google Analytics:

2. Layer (complicated data)

• Return on investment (ROI), new versus returning visitors
• What is the value of a visitor?
• What is the value of the web page?
• Does the internal search help with conversions?
• How is my site engaging with visitors?
• How do bounce rate vary by page viewed or referring source?

Very cool stuff to know about your visitors. You do not only know how many visits your website has. You are also able to see a lot of information about them – where they came from and what they are doing on your website.

The Dashboard

Google analytics is very Web 2.0! The user interface makes use of the latest developments and features in Web 2.0/Ajax technology. The report data is constructed in a highly accessible format, wich makes the user encouraged to drill into the data.

From this dashboard you can now drill into the data by clicking on the menu, but you can also change the dates for the graph and change from daily, to weekly, to monthly view. But what can you use these data for?

To illustrate that I will make a little example:

John is a musician and he lives in Florida. John has this website mostly to get some PR. John is quite good at playing guitar and plays for weddings, birthdays and celebrations. One day he decides to make an online campain to get some more costumers. He wants to brand his own name – be mister guitar in Florida and neighbor states. He makes an AdWords campain with keywords like ‘guitar for weddings’, ‘music for weddings’, ‘guitar florida’, ect. As the time goes by he can se that a lot of people is clicking on his links. But he doesn’t get new costumers.

Let us imagine that John now hired us to analyze the data and increase his conversion rate. In this article I will only focus on Google Analytics and not so much Search engine optimization.

So, the first thing we might have to look up is his visitors. Are they from Florida? Let’s take a look at the geographic overview:

Well it seems that only 6 percent of the visitors (from US) are from Florida. Most visitors comes from California and Montana. Since California and Montana is North-West and Florida is South-East this campain doesn’t make any sense. His visitors from North and West are simply not interested in guitarplayers from Florida.

This will lead us back to the search terms he used for his AdWords campain. ‘Guitar for weddings’ and ‘music for weddings’ might have some relevance to his site, but it is not targeted to his potential costumers. His demographic segment is placed in Florida (some in neightbor states) and if he wants this campain to succeed, he has to be more accurate and targeted.

This may not be the only problem for this campain, but this article is just an intro to show what big potential webanalytics has. Other problems could be his AdWords campain and the text in it he uses and it could be the layout, usability and availability on his website.

I hope you enjoyed my first article, and you were motivated to use Google Analytics.