By Elmer on April 3, 2009

We build websites for a certain or a set of objectives. And by doing so we want to find out if we achieve these objectives. There are many objectives we can think of:

We want more people to know about our brand
We want to attract more targeted visitors from search engines
We want to find out what are the most popular website content visitors go to
We want to sell more products or generate more leads

Probably we have one or more of these objectives in mind already. But if we don’t have tools or methodologies to measure them, it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether these objectives were met (or close to it) or not.

So here comes web analytics to help us find them out. Web analytics are tools that provide us information regarding how our website performs or how its visitors behave. Omniture, WebTrends, Google Analytics and ClickTracks are examples of web analytics tools. Installation to some requires embedding of JavaScript code, while others process raw log files. Either way, they provide invaluable information that help us understand how our websites perform.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tool because it offers comprehensive reports, user friendly interface and best of all, it’s free. Installation is also very easy. Just get a Google Account and access Google Analytics page. Enter your site’s domain name, embed the code on its pages and you should see results about 24 hours after Google Analytics code has been placed embedded on our pages.

Let’s assume that we have done the installation and ready to find out if we achieved our objectives. We can only say we achieved them if we have made comparisons between current and past data, and that such data indicated increase in trend.

So let’s login to our Google Analytics account and view our website analytics data!

We want more people to know about our brand
If our brand name is “beansbox” we want to find out how many people use beansbox as a search phrase. By using this term as search query, we know that visitors are aware about our brand name. To check this data, we go to:

Traffic Sources > Keywords, and search for “beansbox” (or any other brand name). We can compare these data from past months or even extend the date range on the upper right of the report page to see whether there is an upward trend going on.

We want to attract more visitors from search engines
We want to find out if our website is getting more visible on search engines. To check it out, go to:

Traffic Sources > Keywords. A graph of visitors referred by search engines will be displayed at the top. If the number of visitors from search engines increase, that’s good news. As we add new content, new keywords are added on our search referrals and should boost our websites’ visibility in search engines.

We want to find out what are the most popular website content visitors go to
It’s also important to know what content on our site our visitors find interesting. By doing so, we can anticipate what type of content we can add into our pages next time we update our website. This helps our visitors continue to come to our website.

We want to sell more products
Most of us want to improve website performance to make more money. To find out if we achieved that through improved sales on our online shop, we need to set up goals. Goals are distinct steps followed by visitors that we associate with making sales. Commonly, these are pages that say “thank you for making a purchase”. So we conclude that if a visitor comes to this page, he or she must have made a purchase. To track this information, we go to

Analytics Settings > Edit > Conversion Goals and Funnel. Here we can define URLs that represent steps to making a purchase. Say there is a URL for the products page, another one for the check out page and another one for “thank you” page. We place these URLs in chronological order within the Goals section. To access this report, we go to Goals > Funnel Visualization. It helps us identify which pages recorded the highest rate of visitors leaving the site. Maybe this page has broken link or has many menu items that drive visitors away from making a purchase. When we find out the “offending” element(s) we can fix this page.

There are many other uses of web analytics, but they deserve to be in another topic. Meanwhile, let’s see what areas need our attention using web analytics tools so we can promptly address them.

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