Google Analytics – A Web Masters’ Swiss Army Knife

Why I have called Google Analytics as a Swiss army knife, is the amount of information it gives you about your website or blog, which helps you understand your visitors needs and trends. Frankly speaking, I myself haven't tried any other web statistics service; because after I saw one report of Analytics, I was pretty sure I won't need anything else.

It's not possible for me to go into every aspect of Analytics in just one post, so here is the overview.

 

The Dashboard View:

This is a basic description of most data compressed for a 'one look' understanding of stats like site usage (which consists of visits, page views, pages / visit, bounce rate, avg. time on site, % of new visits), visitor overview, map overlay, traffic sources, content overview. You can chose to view data specific to any of the stats specified from the sidebar on the left, some of them are specified below.

 

Visitor overview:

Displays a graph showing the visitors to your domain, with technical information like the browser used by the visitors and their connection speeds, which web-masters find very useful when writing scripts or html code for specific browsers as different browsers have some difference in the way they render a particular code.

Traffic sources overview:

Displays a graph showing visits to your domain, along with information of the top traffic sources, top referring sites and top keywords which connect to your site.

Map overlay:

Shows a world map with indications which allow you to find the country and region in the country in which your visitors live. It also has a table with columns like country, visits, pages/visit, average time on site, % new visits, bounce rate; and also the site average for all these stats.

Content overview:

Content overview, shows you the top contents in your site, tell you how many times a particular content has been viewed, tell you the top landing and leaving pages for your domain.

 

There is just too much for me to try and explain in a post, and you will understand that when you sign up for Google Analytics. As is with all of Google Products, it's perfectly free.

 

Bummer:

There's only one feature that I wished were present here; real-time statistics. I guess all the other features do more than covering up for this.