What Is Google Analytics Value All About?
Google offers a free service called Google Analytics that extracts information from websites and generates statistics about the visitors to that website.
The History of Google Analytics
The original developer of what we know as Google Analytics today was the Urchin Software Cooperation who originally named their program ‘Urchin on Demand’. Google saw the value of the company and bought Urchin Software in 2005, renaming the program ‘Google Analytics’.
Google is still sells the software ‘Urchin on Demand’ and released the sixth edition in April 2008. Urchin on Demand is different than Analytics because it is sold through agents who also offer value added services. Google Analytics, on the other hand, is available for free to all users, even if they do not advertise through Google.
There are, however, some generous limitations that apply to all users of Google Analytics that do not also advertise through Google. Once these limits have been reached there are nominal service fees charged for the use of the tracking software.
How Does Google Analytics Work?
Users are simply required to add Google Analytics Tracking Code, also referred to as a ‘page tag’ to every page of their website. This tracking code loads a file from the Google server and creates a link between the website and the user’s account number.
The tracking code also installs cookies used to store anonymous information about visitor recurrence, time stamps and referrers on visitors’ computers. Google Analytics processed this data on an hourly basis and is only processed a few hours behind real time.
Some people are concerned with giving confidential information such as sales figures, conversion rates or advertisements costs to Google. However, you will ultimately need to feed this type of information to some software tracking company in order to receive detail reports.
What Can Google Analytics Do for You?
Visitors can arrive at a website via a link on e-mail, search engines, pay per click advertising or digital documents; Google analytics keeps track of all of these sources and delivers detailed reports on this information to the client.
Pay per click campaigns on Google can be intensively monitored and conversions to sales easily determined. Sales conversions are monitored by gathering information from the funnel pages on a website, these are the pages leading directly to a sale.
This can give you vital information about abandoned sales, indicating possible problems in the purchasing process. This program is very flexible and can run reports weekly, monthly or any other periods that you may select.
How Can I Benefit from Google Analytics?
Save Time and Money
Most companies do not have the professional resources to perform website analysis in-house. If they did, it would become extremely time consuming and would require a large amount of disk space.
Save on Advertising Expenses
Google Analytics can help you determine which PPC advertisements are not generating many sales and which advertisements are performing very well. By canceling the ads not delivering the desired return on investment and allocating those funds towards effective campaigns, you will save a considerable amount of money and maximize your advertising budget.
Maximize Return on Investment
Ads that lead traffic to your website and contribute to high conversion rates can further be optimized to capitalize no high ranking ads. Google Analytics reports can easily be used in return of investment calculations and used in budgeting and other marketing decisions.