Web analytics for everybody

Google has announced an update to their popular (and free) Google Analytics service, adding a few new useful features and totally revamping the site dashboard interface. Google Analytics, based on the popular high-end web analytics package, Urchin, which Google acquired in 2005, is used by hundreds of thousands of webmasters to track visitor activity on their sites.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, has a nice writeup here on the major differences.

Are you using Google Analytics? Are you using any web analytics program to track site traffic and usage patterns? If not, why not?

There is so much to be learned from web analytics. If you run a website — particularly one that you expect to monetize in any way — you can’t afford to ignore your visitor stats. At their very simplest, they’ll at least tell you where your traffic is coming from, and what pages people are looking at once they arrive.

That information alone can help you learn more about your customers, which can in turn help you target your advertising dollars and improve the site navigation and overall experience for your site visitors. Improved ROI, better targeted site traffic and a higher conversion rate, all because of a bit of simple log file analysis. Who would have thought?

But with a sophistcated tool such as Google Analytics, you can do so much more. For instance, you can determine which search phrases result in traffic that converts best to sales and which bring traffic that doesn’t convert. Using that, you can try to improve the quality of the pages that target those poorly-converting phrases to see if you can improve their performance — or if you feel those phrases aren’t really relevant to your product or service, you can work to de-emphasize them so your pages are focued on more relevant phrases.

I use “regular” log-file analysis software, and I have Google Analytics set up for all the sites I manage. I find the combination gives me a real one-two-punch when it comes to figuring out what’s up with my sites and pointing me to areas for improvement.

With this new interface, Google Analytics promises to be even easier to use and more informative than it was before. And did I mention it’s free?

So, even if you’re already using another analytics package, you might want to at least test the new Google Analytics on a site or two, just to see if you get any additional useful metrics from it. And if you’re not already analyzing your site traffic, then you definitely should sign up for Google Analytics right now. (Don’t worry, we’ll still be here when you get back.)