Introducing . . . Google Analytics
When Google announced its purchase of Urchin Software Corporation
in March 2005, Urchin v5 was the current product with a version 6 in
development as a hosted service – most likely intended to be
launched as Urchin on Demand.
Urchin v5 was re-named Urchin from Google and remained on the
market. Urchin v6 was not released at that time under that name.
Instead, the hosted version was launched as Google Analytics in
November 2005.
Google Analytics was therefore equivalent to a hosted version of an
advanced Urchin v5. A hosted service implies that, although
producing very similar reports to a log-file analysis package, the
JavaScript tags, which are added to each of a site’s pages to
monitor visitor traffic, send the data back to Google’s vast, secure
data centre for storage and processing. Google Analytics therefore
has no requirement to access your web server’s log files nor to
require a system to run on in order to extract, store and process
data.
Google Analytics v2 was announced and released in May 2007 and
further new facilities were introduced in the following October. The
product now provides many compelling features and everyone from
senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to
site owners and content developers can enjoy the benefits.
If you're
already convinced, follow this link to sign up
for Google Analytics
Features
Fast implementation
You can paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your
website pages and tracking begins immediately.
Keyword and campaign comparison
Track and compare all your ads, email newsletters, affiliate
campaigns, referrals, paid links and keywords on Google and other
search engines.
Custom dashboards
No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on
a custom Dashboard that you can email to others.
AdWords integration
Buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to discover
which keywords are most profitable to your business.
Trend and date slider
Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of
long-term trends.
E-Commerce tracking
Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and
latency metrics and identify your revenue sources.
Funnel Visualisation
Find out which pages result in lost conversions and where your
would-be customers go.
Site Overlay
See traffic and conversion information for every link as you browse
your site (no download required).
Email reports
Schedule or send ad-hoc personalised report emails that contain
exactly the information that you want to share.
Geo-Targeting
Find out where your visitors come from and identify your most
lucrative geographic markets.
Event tracking
Even though they are not page views, the event tracking module
can monitor and record visitor interactions with on-page objects
such as Flash animations and movies. Even the most animated of
advertising and entertainment sites can have their visitor
interactions analysed.
Site-search integration
Include on-site search facilities in your analytics. Discover
what visitors are looking for and use the knowledge to improve their
access to the parts of your site which are good for conversion.
Benefits
Google Analytics helps you find out which keywords attract your most
desirable prospects, the advertising copy that generated the most
replies and which landing pages and content are most profitable to
you. There are many other benefits, such as . . .
It's free
Spend on marketing, not on web analytics.
Sophisticated analytics
Google Analytics has all the features you would expect from a
high-end analytics product. It also provides tightly integrated
AdWords support, so you can view AdWords RoI metrics without having
to import cost data or add keyword-tracking codes.
Ease of use
Google Analytics is easy to use for novice marketers while
delivering all the capabilities that experienced web analytics
professionals expect.
Scalable for any size site
Google Analytics is a hosted service that runs on the same servers
that power Google. From large, high-traffic corporate sites to small
sites, Google Analytics delivers consistent service.
Integrated with AdWords
If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics
directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics also
calculates ROI metrics from automatically imported cost and
keyword-tracking data, saving you time.
Tracks all campaigns
Google Analytics tracks all online campaigns, from emails to
keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.
Safe
Google states:
"At Google we take the trust
people place in us very seriously and
we pledge to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. We
understand that web analytics data is sensitive information, so we
provide it with the ironclad protection it deserves."
Learn more about Google Analytics
on Google's web site
