Rocky Fu’s Blog

In this post, I would introduce most Google Analytics features and so you know what you can do with this free tool.

1. Understand your website visitors.
   For a specified period of time, how many visitors have visited your website? How many page views? What is the number of average page views every visitor has generated? What is the average time each visitor spend on your website? What percentage of visitors are new visitors? What web browsers and Internet connection speed are your visitors using?
2. Find out the traffic sources.
   What are the top traffic sources? What is the percentage of direct traffic (by typing the URL directly, from bookmark), referring traffic (from other websites), and search engine traffics (natural search listings and paid search)?

   You need to understand how people land on your website and where they are from. Direct visitors are some of your best visitors; they have visited your site and are interested in what you have to offer. It also indicates the level of loyalty and recognitions. Here is an article explaining why you should care direct traffic.

   From referring traffic data, you can understand more about linking building efforts and sponsored links if any so that you can also measure the return on investment. Similar for search engine traffic, either via natural listing or pay-per-click (PPC) traffic.

3. Find out about your website contents.
   What are the top pages with the most page views? It tells you what are the most popular pages you visitors like. What are the top landing pages? It indicates the top pages most visitor journey are initiated from. What are the top pages most people exit from?
4. Dig out the keywords. 
   What are the keywords used  by the searchers in Google, Yahoo, or MSN that land them on your website? Internal search. If you website has a search box implemented and allows your visitors to search for the contents, why don’t you find out what are the keywords used?
5. Track the clicks.
   How many times have your visitors clicked on an external link or a form submission button? How many times has a document or white paper been downloaded?
6. Understand your site navigation.
   Take my personal website top navigation for example:
   
   With Google Analytics’ site overlay feature, you can view the relative clicks on each menu item like this:
   

If you are new to web analytics, you don’t really need to start with more advanced software. I saw some clients using paid ones like Web Trends, but they aren’t able to get anything helpful out of the data. For more technical guide, you can refer here for more information.

Related Posts:

• How Can You Learn From Bounce Rate?
• Google Ad Planner Helps Online Media Planning
• Update on Google Ad Planner
• Site Audit 101: Does Your Site Have Malware?
• Direct Visit Traffic Is Worth $5.69 Apiece!