Google analytics for monitoring website traffic

Currently I’m use Google analytics to monitor all visitor activities on my websites and blogs. Prior to this, I was using Statcounter to keep track of visitors on my websites. I love Google analytics because it gives me lots of details about the people that are visiting my website.

Some facts about Google analytics

Google analytics is a free traffic monitoring service offered by Google that webmasters and bloggers use to monitor the traffic on their websites and blogs. Google analytics (GA) can track all kind of referrals including referrals from search engines, display advertising, PPC networks, e-mail marketing and PDF documents. We can monitor up to 50 websites with a single account on GA.

How to use Google Analytics

To start using GA, we need to create an account on Google analytics. If you have already a gmail account or Google account, you can use that to sign up on GA. If you don’t have a account on Gmail or Google.com, create an account on any of them. Once you complete the information asked during the sign up process, you will be offered some ready to use Java Script code that you will need to add to your website or blog template from where it will be visible on all pages in your website/blog.

Once you have added the GA tracking code in your website template, click on the ‘Check Status’ link available in your GA account. By clicking this link, you will know if you have installed the Urchin (GA code) properly on your website or not. Now check your GA account after 5-6 hours, you will have access to visitors stats that visited your website in the last few hours. Traffic stats that are available through Google Analytics cab be 3-4 hours in arrears of real time.

Benefits of using Google analytics

With Google analytics, we are able to know how many people are actually visiting our website on hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. With GA, we have full access to all Sources from where we are getting the traffic and which keyword is giving you the maximum visitors like. Here is the list of some benefits that we get with Google Analytics:

Top Traffic Sources

We have full access to all traffic sources even if we got even single click of that source. Top traffic sources for my blog are Google, Yahoo, MSN, Wikipedia, Blogcatalog, Mybloglog, DP forum, StumbleUpon, Digg, Squidoo and even some people directly visiting my blog.

Keywords list

GA gives you the complete list of keywords that people use to find your website in search engines with their respective counts. If your website is appearing on top on Google, Yahoo or MSN for a particular keyword, then you can use GA actually to see how many
People you are driving to your website with this keyword on daily basis.

Visitor type

Visitor type gives you the count and percentage of new visitor and Returning visitor. One should aim at increasing Returning visitor to their website.

Landing page

Landing page is the page of your website that visitor arrives after clicking on a link. It can be the home page or any other page on your website. So with landing page, you can judge how people are actually finding your website pages and the most used pages on your website.

Continent

This feature tells you how many people you are actually getting from all continents. Like how many people actually visited your website from Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania or Africa continent.

Sub Continent Region

Sub continent feature tells you how many people you are getting on your website from various parts of all continents like Northern America, Northern Europe, South-Eastern Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Southern Asia, Western Asia, Caribbean, Eastern Asia, Western Europe, Southern Europe etc.

Country/Territory

With this service, you will know which country is giving you the maximum visitor with total visitor count from a particular country. Some of countries from where I get the traffic on my websites are United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, India, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany, Ireland etc.

Region

It will give you the complete list of regions people are coming using all major search engines.

City

With this feature, you can know which city is giving you the maximum number of hits on your website worldwide.

Browser

It informs you about the web browser people are using to find your website. Mostly people use internet Explorer or Firefox to surf internet. So you can expect these web browsers giving you the most of traffic on your website. Safari, Netscape, Opera and NetFront are some other web browsers people use to browse internet.

Direct Traffic

It will inform you about the number of people who actually open your website directly by typing your website URL in their address bar.

Referring Sites

It gives you the list of all referring sites that people actually use to click to your website links available on these sites.

Miscellaneous

With these terms, you will know about many more terms like Page Views, Bounce Rate, New visits, Avg. time on site, paid, non-paid, Adwords, Campaigns when you start using Google Analytics on your website or blog.

I hope this article will help you better understand Google analytics and its usage. And if you have any question about Google analytics, let me know in the comments section.