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Why is Google Analytics on your site anyway?
I am sure that most of the sites developed today end up with statistics provided by Google Analytics (GA), but does anyone care about the data provided by this service? Okay, okay so you know you’ve had 10 buzillion hits this week but what does that really tell you? How many of those hits (or should it be visits) are from actual humans? How many are from customers? Do people look beyond the default dashboard view of GA?
I use GA pretty extensively but even I have to admit that some of the more relevant features related to strategic planning and user interaction design have been neglected. Site analytics can be a hugely useful tool in ensuring that you are delivering the right content to the right people. Many clients are overly concerned simply about traffic and aren’t knowledgeable enough about how their site is being used.
If you are a developer who provides GA (or any site analytics) as part of your solution it is your responsibility to ask the questions to determine if the client understands why you are giving this to them and how they should use it. Some people may disagree with me but I think it is important for me to do this for my clients and I believe that may small shops or individual developers perform full service tasks for their clients.
If you are a website owner then site analytics can provide you with a wealth of information about your visitors. This information can be used to help with your marketing and sales plan. For example, after reviewing the statistics for the category level pages of a magazine subscription site we noticed that very few people were using the View All link, but rather using the Previous and Next links. This showed that customers were browsing more and wanted the information in smaller chunks. We were able to reorganise this page to make it easier for visitors to navigate and get information and this lead to a significant increase in conversions. Without making use of GA we would have missed this.
So do yourself a favour and ask your website consultant to school you a bit on your chosen analytics package and see how it can help you!
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