Esther C Kane

There are some FABULOUS statistics that you can get about the visitors to your website via the Google Analytics tool.  Let me give you a brief explanation of each section.

Benchmarking
Google explains “benchmarking” like this…”Based on the number of visits each site receives, sites of similar sizes are grouped together under three classifications: small, medium, and large. This way, you can compare yourself to other similarly sized sites.”

Basically, it gives you an idea of how your website is doing compared to others of the same size.  Of course, there are other factors to consider, the time of year, your industry, etc.  But at least you have a “benchmark” idea of where your site may be worse off than others in your size range.

Map Overlay
One of my very favorite stats on Google Analytics is the “map overlay”.  It gives me a detailed list of where my visitors are coming from.  It’s broken down to region, country, state and city.  And not only does it give you the places where the visitors are coming from, but it also gives you the keyword phrases the users typed in to find you!  There’s alot more information it also gives so check it out!

New vs. Returning
You may be working hard to get new people to your website.  You know, the first time visitors.  Google Analytics breaks it down for you by letting you know which visitors have been there before and which ones are new!  It’s a thing of beauty.

Languages
Are you getting visitors coming to your site who are French?  Do you want to attract a French demographics?  No?  Well, you’ll have to analyze why your website is doing that but at least this tool gives you the data on what language demographic you’re getting.

Visitor Trending
Here you can see “trends” on your site.  What days are the most popular?  Is your site bounce rate getting better or worse?  Are more people visiting more pages?

Visitor Loyalty
How many visitors come to the site once, twice or more?  How long do they stay?  How deep into the site do they go?  Lots of information here on this stat.

Browser Capabilities
What browsers are your visitors using?  Do the majority of them use Firefox?  What does your website look like in Firefox?  Maybe the majority of your visitors have a 1280×800 screen resolution.  What does your website look like in that resolution?  Fixing any of these problems may increase your conversion rate.

Network Properties
What ISP’s are your visitors using?  Are they on high speed?  Cable?  Satellite?  This many not matter but if your website has alot of Flash and graphics and loads up slowly, you may want to cut down the size of your pages so that slower service providers can accomodate.

Mobile
This is one of my favorite stats.  Because of the explosion of mobile use in the USA in the last year, it’s only natural to begin tracking how many visitors come to your website via a mobile device.   If your target audience is “on the go” then you may want to provide mobile coupons, interactive maps, easier forms, etc.

The concept here is to use the great information that Google Analytics gives you to improve your website.  Not only for the sake of the site, but for the sake of your business!