Using Google Analytics to Tune your Site.

A few weeks back, I signed up for google analytics. This is a tool that analyses the web traffic that passes through your website. We will call it GA in short form and hope no one objects. If you wish to make your website profitable, then you have a good reason to read on.

As a newbie to the tool, it took me an 8 minute video with some highlights to get interested in the tool. Then, this was followed up by a small copy procedure that connects my web site to GA, which then starts gathering the data and starts analyzing my website.

EARLY GOALS: When I started out, my goals were simple. Install the tool and wait for the tool to turn in something meaningful. Once, it reports something useful, will consider digging deeper into it.


INFORMATION STARTS TO FLOW:

1. Customer Base - The first Surpise: It took only a week for the tool to smash my view of the customer base for my website. The tool simply told me, I have visitors from 24 more countries than my imagination would allow.

2. Tuning your site's Content - Second Surprise: When you design a web application or a website's information architecture, the only way to know its effectiveness is to deploy and study it.

Now, GA has a report that shows a click picture overlayed on my site's pages. If my interpretation of this report is accurate, it starts to give some clues on the behaviours of the users around the content of your web site. You may be surprised to know some of the content that you thought were right on the money are the ones that are left untouched by the users.

As good as the software is, you cannot rule out bugs etc. or your own misinterpretation of the data presented. It is often a good idea to cross-verify the information with another source, before taking any decision on moving out some or most of the content.

3. Traffic Shaping: GA reported that my site had a suprisingly high number of direct visitors followed by search engine directed traffic. Now, I considered that a bonus.

Tools like GA get you to focus on your strategies, goals and to fine tune your web applications and content. If you can bear with the small learning curve, you can put it to good use.