“Google Analytics 101″ was published in February/March 2011 issue of Canadian Florist Magazine

How well is your website performing? If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it: this is what Google Analytics is all about. Google Analytics is one of the most powerful website statistics services available. It provides you with detailed data to help you measure and monitor exactly how your customers use your website. The best thing about this tool is that it’s free.

Though getting an Analytics account is easy, installing does require access to your website files. Go to Google.com/Analytics/ to sign up and check out their getting started and installation guides. A snippet of code must be added to all the pages of your website so that they can be tracked and appear in your reports. Talk with your webmaster and have them install it for you if you don’t have direct access to your site’s code. Once that’s done, just remember that sometimes it can take 24 hours to start seeing stats come in. Here’s a look at Google Analytics terminology and what to watch out for:

Visitors and traffic sources

Direct Traffic is visitors who clicked a bookmark or typed your URL into their browsers. This number will be higher or lower based on a couple of factors; namely, how much offline website promotion you’re doing and how long your shop and site have been around. These visitors are usually your best customers since they already know you.

Referring Sites are visitors who came to your site via all those directories, social networks, blogs and partnering websites that link to your site. If you are paying for some of these, this is where you can gauge your ROI (return on investment).

Search Engines are visitors who get to your site from places like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. It’s important to remember that if you are paying for any pay-per-click ads (such as Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter) you will see that traffic here too, but don’t worry – it’s easy to filter paid versus unpaid traffic here.

User behaviour and navigation

Keywords are search terms used in search engines – they can be both normal and paid traffic. If you’ve been optimizing your site (SEO, or search engine optimization) these stats will help you assess how you’re doing, and even discover potential keywords.

If you compare your keywords with things like Time on Site (how long visitors are on your site) and Bounce Rate (percentage of people who leave immediately upon arrival) you can gauge which keywords are likely your most profitable and relevant to your visitors. Keywords that drive the most traffic and have the longest “Time on site” and the lowest “bounce rates” are likely the ones you should be aiming for.

Content Reports are a great way to measure how visitors are navigating your site. This section of Google Analytics contains the most popular pages on your website. Look closely: certain categories or products may surprise you.

Top Landing Pages show you the pages on which most visitors arrive on your website. This is not always your homepage, of course; are you putting your best foot forward here? How are bounce rates? Also, take a look at top exit pages. Is there something more you could do to prevent visitors from leaving?

Making Changes to Your Site

Once you have spent some time acquainting yourself with your website’s visitors and how they are interacting with your content, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions. Be patient and wait to base any changes on at least a couple of week’s stats. If you’re too hasty, data that might have been collected (and might have told a different story) will be lost with the old version of your site.

Controlling the Report Dates will help you gain perspective if you’ve made changes to the site or if there is a holiday coming. Google has added the Annotation functionality so you can note site changes to Google Analytics directly on the graph. Take advantage by adding a note on the day you add a holiday special, or start a newsletter campaign. This will help you remember when you started the promotion and assist you in evaluating how well it worked.

Google Analytics really shines for florists over time; you’ll be able to compare report dates of month over month and holiday over holiday and this is invaluable. Having this information can help when planning your seasonal marketing and even in anticipating staff needs.

“Google Analytics 101″ was published in February/March 2011 issue of Canadian Florist Magazine