Google Analytics Help
We would like to offer assistance to those needing to configure their Adwords ads to take full advantage of the system’s features.
Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your site and how they interact with it. You’ll be able to compare the behavior and profitability of visitors who were referred from each of your ads, keywords, search engines, and emails, and gain valuable insight into how to improve your site’s content and design. However large or small your site, and however you drive traffic to it – whether it’s unpaid search, partner sites, AdWords, or other cost-per-click programs – Google Analytics tracks it, from click to conversion.
Assistance with:
- Tracking Code Insertion and Understanding
- Interpretation of Data
- Computing ROI
- Computer Cost-per-sale and Cost-per-lead
- Creation of meaningful reports
- Building filters
- Setting up direct referrals
Special considerations for Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tag-based analysis tool. This means that you cannot go back and tweak settings to fix mistakes on data gathering. For this reason, any Google Analytics setup needs to be carefully crafted and tested heavily during the first few days of setup. This will let you make sure the data you’re gathering is truly what you want.
This is of course different than log file based tools, which can be asked to re-analyze the data anytime, grabbing stored information from the raw logs to re-generate your reports.
Problems tag-based analytics.
- It can’t capture everything: Redirects, PDF downloads, etc. are not available.
- It doesn’t offer technical stats: bandwidth and page not found errors are only available in logfiles.
- Google has your data, and it will be hard to change.
- It’s not 100% accurate. Javascript errors, DNS and other problems are recorded in logfile based tools, but not on Google Analytics.
- It introduces possibility for bugs: The more script, the more chances of a script error. It also complicates server-side includes.
Of course, the major advantages are the ease of setup. You can have data gathering set up in a few minutes. Logfile analysis takes a little more time to set up and prepare reports for, and you must re-analyze the data in batches.
Which type of analytics makes sense for you will depend on your site, your plans, and analysis needs.
