Web Analytics - Boosting Performance

Every web-site/blog has visitors. Understanding the regional spread of these visitors and analyzing which articles (pages, products, etc.) bring in more visitors (customers), is vital for improving the business of the web-store or attracting more visitors to the blog/web-site.

In this blog-post we are going to emphasis two popular web-site tracking tools - ClustrMaps and Google Analytics. In the next few sections I will refer blogs and web-stores as also web-sites. The principle is same for all of these.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a brilliant innovation from labs of Google. It helps you analyze the traffic feed of your web-site in various perspectives. As Google describes it -

"Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your web-site traffic and marketing effectiveness"

It has some really cool features that a web-site manager would love. There are four major components on Google Analytics -

Visitors Overview - This component keeps track of every visitor that visits your web-site. It provides complete information on the number of visits, number of absolute unique visits, page-views, total time spent by visitors on the site and a percentage of new visits. One important parameter it keeps track of is the bounce rate. Bounce Rate is a measure to see how appealing the web-page was for the visitors. High percentages of bounce rate indicate the visitors moved out of the web-site quickly. It maintains complete information of the browsers used by the visitors and their connection speed.

The geographical aspect of the visitor overview is marvelous. It shows a comprehensive analysis of the visitor’s geographical location. It pin-points the city from where a visitor has come.

Traffic Sources Overview - This component gives an overview of the sources of the traffic. It also provides a report on the sites which led the visitors to your web-site. For people targeting search engines, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the keywords which led the people to the web-site.

Content Overview - This component provides a detailed analysis of individual pages viewed by the visitors. It provides us with the total number of page-views, unique page-views and the bounce rate. It also provides us with the list of the pages which brought in the most visitors. It also shows us how many times each component of the web-site was clicked and the navigation patterns of the visitors.

Goals Overview - This component helps us to understand our objectives and keep a track of how far we have reached them. Goals can be setup with respect to every traceable unit of the blog like the page views, keyword patterns, etc.

Signing Up for Google Analytics

So if you are excited by these features and would like to add Google Analytics support to your web-site, follow these steps -

1. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html
2. Sign in with your Google account
3. Sign up for Google Analytics by providing the URL of your web-site and few other details
4. After filling in the form, you will be provided with a JavaScript code snippet. Copy this code to your web-site. For blogger, paste the code before the closing head tag in the Edit HTML component of the layout tab
5. After a few hours, if the process was carried out properly the Google Analytics service will be running on your web-site. You can view the status by signing in at the Google Analytics web-site

ClustrMaps

Google Analytics is good for analyzing your web-site behind the screen. But it does not allow visitors to see the geographical diversity of the other visitors. So if you are interested in showing the visitor count along with their geographical location to the public, go for ClustrMaps.

To register your web-site with ClustrMaps, follow these steps -

1. Go to http://www.clustrmaps.com/
2. Provide the URL of your web-site and give your email id
3. Select the style which suits your web-site
4. Copy the code which is provided to your web-site

Well that’s it for this post. Hope this post helps in increasing the visitors to your web-site. :)