Understand Your Statistics
We have mentioned the excellent (free) Google Webmaster Tools available to you with your free Google account. HTN’s Profits Plus Sitemaps module automatically sends data to Google in Google sitemap and Google Base data feed formats. This gives Google specific data about your site and products to feed up to searchers.
Today we want to talk about Google Analytics, whose purpose is to give you tools to analyze and improve your site.
The idea behind Google Analytics is to capture data about the page activities that occur on your site. From the data collected and the tools to analyze that data, you can learn a surprising number of things about how people actually use your site. When someone visits a page, a snippet of code embedded in that page captures the event. Google amasses the data from those visit and presents it to you in chart and graph form.
Besides being inherently interesting, the data can tell you how many visitors your site really had, what pages they viewed, where they came from and what page they left from, what search term brought them to you and how long they stayed on the site and – possibly most important to you as site owner – whether they purchased anything during the visit. You can see where geographically your traffic comes from. You can also tell what browsers visitors are using. You can even tell what version of the browser they used and the screen size they viewed your site on. No need to guess or assume. The hard data are available.
