Are you looking for a tool to analyze your website traffic? We suggest using Google Analytics, which is free and offers several advanced features. Here are some of the advantages of using Google Analytics:

• You can utilize powerful visualization tools like In-Page Analytics and Flow Visualization. In-Page Analytics helps you see how users interact with the pages of your site, while Flow Visualization evaluates the path taken by your visitor to reach your site.
• An Advanced Segments option will help you differentiate and analyze specific traffic. For example, you can create a segment to get information on visitors who are purchasers, with another segment for non-purchasers.
• The Content section of Google Analytics helps you see how often visitors come to your site and how long they stay. The new Content Experiment section offers the opportunity to change the versions of your site’s pages to check which variation leads to the highest number of conversions. You can opt for up to five variations of a page and evaluate the conversion rate(s).
• Social reports help you track the impact of social media on your website traffic. You can easily track down the sharing of your content on various social sites as well as on your own website by others. This will help you decide which sections of your website are popular with end users and build promotion for your site.
• Goals and Event Tracking lets you trace conversions, sales, downloads or video plays. You can easily customize your reports based on which actions of visitors you want to watch that will be important for your business objectives.

Google Analytics Set-Up

To enjoy the above benefits, here’s all you need to do:

• Have a Google account and activate Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/).
• Click the “Access Analytics” button.
• Enter the account name (“domain.com,” URL of your website, your time zone). You will also be asked if you want to share your Analytics data with third-party services or other Google products.
• Once you are done with your account creation, you need to set up the Tracking Code Configuration for your website. The installation process differs and is based on how an individual website is built. If your website theme does not have an admin panel option, find the part of your site’s template before the closing </head>tag in the HTML code, which is generally the “header.php” file. If your site has a collection of HTML pages, install the tracking code before the </head>tag on each of the pages that you want to include in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a wonderful tool for search engine optimization as it allows great insight into the behavior of site visitors. By highlighting visitors’ behavior, it helps you put more focus on activities that will draw in more visitors to your site.

Google Analytics and AdWords

Google AdWords is a unique service that lets you buy ads that are displayed to users when visitors search or browse through Google or websites in Google. On the other hand, Analytics lets you analyze the traffic received by your website. By combining Analytics and AdWords, you can get valuable information on how your ads affect the page views of your site. The Analytics report will throw light on post-click performance metrics of the traffic you receive from AdWords to strategically assess the outcomes that result from searchers clicking on your AdWords ads.