One ‘Google Analytics’ Cappuccino for me please!

Ah…we so belong to the world of instant coffee and the scene at uber Google office was no different. Everyone, from experts in almost every facet of the web, to analysts, to ad execs to the fast growing breed of online business professionals got together this weekend to get a instant flavor of ‘how best I can use GA to do my job better?'

Even before I jump on to talking about GA or rather Web Analytics (WA), I want to go on record to define web analytics landscape where GA is nothing but just a tool.

Web analytics simply put is a data analysis (of the online activity) and aggregation exercise that helps you find out what any visitor is doing on your site. For some smarter analysts it also means picking up indicators on ‘why’ is he (user) doing whatever the hell he is doing. The latter is more probabilistic (and definitely more meaningful) in nature which can be supported by our aka stats models at a certain confidence interval to help an org take action on this data.

Some tools would even run this analysis for you. Some of GA’s brother and sister tools are: Click Tracks, Percent Mobile, TigTags, Urchin, StatCounter, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Xiti, GoingUp, Statsit and CrazyEgg and for gaining competitive intelligence there is Compete, Google Insights for Search, Google’s Ad Planner and so on..

Like they say ‘best things in life come for free’ so do these tools!

Hence, getting started is as simple as that 1..2..3..GO!

1. Find a playground:

If you are a novice then create a blog or any content site, if you already have a website great!; those of you who are lucky to get access to your corporate website even better! (but it is rare unless you have 15 rounds of permission…oh all the corporate hoopla, amusingly this holds true not only for the marketing underdogs but the webmasters too...some consolation for deprived souls:); if, none of the above, then try getting access from anyone who owns the space (freelancing can be another option where you end up gaining so much tacit knowledge…)

2. Install and verify the Tool:

Google Analytics is a script-based analytics service that gathers detailed information on your site and advertising once it has been properly configured.

It’s pretty simple too. Copy paste the GA link on each page of your site (could be any other tool listed above) and hit on verify to test if it is properly installed. If you have more than one domain or an e-commerce site or third party domains then go through this useful resource.

3. List down the questions or rather ‘to dos’:

What you want the data to answer…in a more WA language set goals for your site.

Lets say first probing your data with questions like why do visitors come to my site, which of my site pages are turning visitors away and why, does my site meet their goals, if yes (yeeeaah!) and now what do I finally want (money/more traffic for free ego massage/what?)
If you ask me, I like to set both quantitative and qualitative goals to get the whole picture. So for e.g. my blog has the quantitative goal of getting better ranking in search results and also qualitative goal of receiving comments that have useful content which benefits me and my blog visitors further.

I can talk about goal setting and funnel creation as an entire separate topic in one of my following posts but for now using the drop down menu would come handy once you are on the goal setting page.

There is of course so much exciting stuff to tinker with once your data starts flowing to you – but let’s catch a breath and deal with it another day.

If I can get you started on your own fascinating journey of WA – you've just made my day!