Week 13 - Google Analytics

Our assignment this week was to look at Google Analytics, which looks at web activity and allows you to analyze who is visiting your site, how many people are visiting, how long they stay, and a bunch of other information.   All I can say is Wow!  I'm so impressed that this is available.  I had no idea.

From a business standpoint, this information is gold. For many years our business has had a website. It's old and out of date and pretty ugly (working on re-writing that right now).  Each year the fee for the domain name and website hosting would come around and I'd ask my husband, "Do you really think anyone is using this and do we really have to pay for it?" He would nod and I'd get out the checkbook.  Actually this is why I decided to do this class. I wanted to make sure we were actually getting something for the money. It was always just a guess. Little did I know that Google Analytics was there waiting with more information than I could even handle.   There are a number of different categories that would be useful for us:

• How many people are visiting - This is what I always wanted to know - whether the site we have is attracting any traffic. 
• Where the people visiting are from - Since we are a local business and need to visit the job site, it's interesting to know whether the visitors are local or not. If there was traffic from other parts of the country, then maybe we might consider an e-commerce business of standard size covers.
• What time of day they visit - This would be useful in determining when to post items to Facebook to get attention, especially if the visitors to the site would have a way to like our Facebook page. 
• Browser type - This would be useful to make sure our website is functioning correctly on all the different browsers
• Mobile - The website we are writing will utilize Responsive Web Design, which resizes for mobile. It will be interesting to see if we get more mobile traffic once that's done. 
• New Vs Returning - Is our website interesting enough to get people to return to it more than once, or do they come and leave right away?
• Visit time - Is the site interesting enough to make them want to stay for more than a few seconds. 
• Age - Are we targeting the right demographic of people who might need a cover?

I'm sure there would be much more we could do with this information, but to get started, these would be good categories to cover. 

In real life, I work in the Business Intelligence space. I have to say that the use of BI in Google Analytics is really good, and the fact that it's free to everyone is really amazing.  I look forward to getting to use their tools more.