Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Google Analytics is by far the most robust free site side analytics program out there.  Now owned by Google, Google Analytics started out its life as a small analytics company called Urchin.

Google Analytics is used by millions of sites (hobby as well as ecommerce) to measure the amount and quality of traffic to a website. 

Moreover, if configured properly, Google Analytics can also measure predefined KPIs and Goals such as purchases, downloads, subscriptions, thereby showing you which keywords convert to business.

Here are a few Google Analytics tips that I’ve gathered to help you get the most out of the package:

1. Use the filter at the bottom of the keywords list to include and exclude certain keywords.  For instance, you can exclude your own brand name thereby allowing you to see which generic keywords are driving traffic to your site.

2. Use the compare two dates/metrics at the top to be able to see trends across the same variable on two different dates.

3. Exclude your IP address so that your figures are not skewed

4. Configure site search measurement  in order to get valuable data on how users  search  within your site. 

5. Under “Content” use site overlay to see what links on you site are most popular.  This will give you a better idea of what content on your site is appealing to your users and  gives you the confidence to remove or  place “Nofollows” on non popular links.

The above are a few tips for using Google Analytics.  There are many more fantastic features including the ability to export and email reports as well as integrate with Adwords in order to measure the performance of your paid ads.

In a nutshell, if you haven’t used Google Analytics yet, you’re completely missing out on a fantastic free Analytics resource. 

Do you know what’s your website’s bounce rate? Do you know what bounce rate is?  If you don’t then you should learn what bounce rate is as soon as possible and this is the best place to start.

Let me begin by giving you a quick explanation of what bounce rate is. 

Bounce rate is defined as the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of your site per session divided by the total number of website visitors.

Reasons for a high bounce rate could include:

1. Your page doesn’t load fast enough so visitors click the back button on their browser.

2. They don’t like what they see so they click the back button on their browser.

3. They feel that your site’s navigation is too confusing so they (yup, you guessed it) click the back button on their browser.

In all the above cases, your visitors were lost before they even gave you a chance to present to them your information/product/service or whatever else they were searching for and you didn’t provide.

Google Analytics (previously Urchin) is a web analytics tool that provides you with many statistics about your website including the dreaded bounce rate. 

With a simple piece of code provided by Google you’ll be able to monitor many aspects of your site’s statistics and you’d be in a better position to optimise your site to reduce (among other things) the bounce rate of your visitors.

Read more about bounce rate at the Official Google Analytics Blog.