Google Analytics - Required Insight

May 20th, 2008 · No Comments

I’m currently in the process of overhauling my oldest affiliate content site. This has been a very tedious process to say the least. The site was originally setup to use SSI (server side includes) since at the time, it was suggested to me to go that route in order to include things like a common sidebar navigation and footer includes. The concept is definitely sound, but the method to implement it is kind of outdated.

A much more flexible way to achieve this is to use PHP includes instead. Unfortunately, SSI and PHP cannot coexist. So I had the excruciating task of going through 70+ files and making the changes by hand. I realize that I could have possibly achieved the change over by using a global search and replace, but the extent of the changes combined with some custom changes on a per page basis, scared me off from attempting that approach.

The overhaul was also a good opportunity to analyze and revamp my site’s structure as well as some of its content. I also was pretty oblivious to the entire concept of tracking when I constructed the site almost 3 years ago and I cringed a few times as I went through each page.

One of the things on my “To Do” list was to finally implement Google Analytics on my site. I had been using SiteMeter, which does provide some very useful information on visitor behavior, particularly outclicks, which gives me a pretty good indication if visitors are clicking on my affiliate links. But I knew there was still a lot of information that SiteMeter wasn’t providing to me.

I’ve only had Google Analytics on my site for less than a month and already the information it’s giving me is really eye-opening. For example, I had no idea how high my “Bounce Rate” was! It seems that almost half of the visitors to my site are immediately hitting the back button. Though Google Analytics can’t tell you exactly why that happens, it can provide a few clues.

I found by sorting the keywords visitors use to get to my site in GA by bounce rate, gives me an idea of which keywords have the highest bounce rate. I can now see that the pages visitors land on for some of these searches do not really provide much information for what they searched on. Of course, some of the searches I really can’t help them with, but for a lot of them I can see where I have some work to do.

You can get GA either from within your Adwords account if you have one or directly from the GA page. I’ve never tried any of the paid tracking and analytics solutions, but it’s really hard for me to imagine anything more comprehensive or easier to implement and use than GA. I think it’s pretty incredible that Google offers this for free.

Of course, it does come at the price of Google gathering a lot of information about your site(s). I know there are some people who refuse to use GA because of this. I believe in having a healthy level of paranoia, but I’m willing to take this chance in order to have the information that GA provides about visitor behavior on my sites. In the long run, I think that the benefits greatly outweigh any possible risks.