Friday, May 11, 2007 at 10:47 AM
Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their site for indexing in Google. Eighteen months ago, Google launched another free tool for webmasters - Google Analytics - which tells you about your visitors and the traffic patterns to your site using a JavaScript code snippet to execute tracking and reporting. This past Tuesday, Google Analytics launched a new version, with an easier-to-use interface that has more intuitive navigation and greater visibility for important metrics. We also introduced some collaboration and customization features such as email reports and custom dashboards.But we wanted to highlight some of the webmaster-specific metrics within Google Analytics for our regular readers, since it offers a lot of easily-accessible information that will enrich the work you're doing.
For instance, do you know how many visitors to your site are using IE versus Firefox? And even further, how many of those IE or Firefox users are converting on a goal you have set up? Google Analytics can tell you information like this so you can prepare and tailor your website for your audience. Then, when you are designing, you can prioritize your testing to make sure that the site works on the most popular browsers and operating systems first.
Are your visitors using Java-enabled browsers? What version of Flash are the majority of your visitors using? What connection speed do they have? If you find that lots of visitors are using a dial-up service, you're going to want to put in some more effort to streamline the load time of images on your site, for example.
Plus, Google Analytics will make your company's marketing division very happy. It reports on the most effective search keywords, the most popular referring sources and the geographic location of visitors, as well as the performance of banner ads, PPC keyword campaigns, and email newsletters. If you haven't tried Google Analytics, watch the Flash tour of the product or set up a free account now and see statistics on your visitors and the traffic to your site within three hours.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
10 comments:
I really, really like this new product. But, I thought Google would have taken this opportunity to make Google Analytics part of a wider platform, encompassing the likes of Google AdWords, Analytics and Webmaster Tools all into one. Or would that be overkill?
I like Google Analytics too, but find I still go back to viewing my sitemeter stats. I like knowing who's online at any given time, and I like site meter's referral tool better. It tells me the specific search keywords used on each search query, rather than just the search engine and the fact it is organic.
New webmaster tools is great but what happened to the old ones? We used the Google Remove URL tool a lot to prevent complaints about privacy. The log file belonging to that tool was essential for our way of working with it.
Today we find the Removal Tool is completely renewed, which is great, but the logfile disappeared, which is a disaster. What can we do to get those "expired" notices back?
Really like the new google analytics! Great job developers!
What do you google guys think about hosting the urchin.js file locally, and re-downloading an updated version every day using a cron job?
Faster Google Analytics by hosting urchin.js locally
We find Analytics one of the most useful tools on the web. If there were any criticisms they would be these:
1. The time taken moving between Adwords, Analytics, Webmaster (Sitemaps) and your related sevices. Anything that would bring these closer together would make our life easier.
2. We often have to use different Google accounts, either for different clients, or for example if acting as a Google checkout buyer or seller. The restrictions about only being logged into one account at a time cause some time wasting for us.
Overall though we're really impressed by your range of services and use them all the time. So keep up the good work, developments and improvements.
Thanks for the feedback, Peter.
Regarding your second point (about switching between accounts), you might want to check out a browser extension such as CookieSwap. There are browser add-ons freely available these days that can make it really easy to switch between multiple accounts without logging in and out all the time.
Good tip Susan, thanks, I'm still using IE most of the time (as 80% of my customers still do) but CookeSwap gives yet another reason why I should consider the switch!
Regards,
Pete
Web Development and Marketing in Cornwall, UK.
I think I am on topic with this but please forgive me if not.
I find google analytics really useful but the main problem I encountered was the increase in bandwith as soon as I implemented it.
As a rule it seems to hammer the bandwidth of any site I use it on or am I doing something wrong.
Ken Jones
Total Fencing Web Admin
Hi everyone,
Since nearly a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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