Google Analytics is a great tool for finding out how many people visit your website and what they do when they are there. Google recently added and improved some features to give you even more information about web visitors.

Two of the most interesting features are Visitor Flow (found under the Audience tab) and Events Flow (under the Content tab). These show you a graphical flow of where your visitors enter your website and what they do next.  Breaking visitors down by location, the Visitor Flow tool shows you which page they landed on, where they went next and how many people “dropped out” (i.e. left your website) at each stage, and you can view as many steps as there are until every visitor has left your site. The Events Flow tool works in exactly the same way, but it monitors downloads, videos and external links rather than internal pages. You can even filter the traffic flow into, for example, paid traffic (from Google Ads), mobile traffic or return visitors. It’s fascinating to see the flow of traffic through your website, and you can spot areas where people are leaving and perhaps use that information to tweak your website and encourage them to stay longer.

Another exciting feature is the Social section, which you’ll find under the Traffic Sources tab. This lets you monitor how much traffic arrives via social media networks, and which pages have been shared using the social media buttons on your site. (You do have social media share buttons, don’t you?!) If you run an e-commerce site you can also set goals to monitor how many visitors that arrive via social media channels convert into buying customers. And as before, there’s also a new Social Visitors Flow so you can track their progress through the site.

Perhaps a less exciting but equally useful feature is that you can now easily export reports for nearly every aspect of the Analytics – at the top of each report there’s a button to Export and you can choose spreadsheet or PDF format. You can even schedule it to email you Analytics reports every day/week/period you specify – just click the Email tab.

These new additions, combined with the new Real Time Analytics introduced earlier in the year, mean you can now get an even more comprehensive picture of how your website is working and instantly make changes to improve performance and conversions.

If you don’t yet have Google Analytics set up on your website, or you’d like some help understanding the information it gives you to improve your website, give us a call on 01793 608777 and we’ll be happy to help!

(News on the recent Google Analytics update included in this blog post)

With any form of marketing, let alone internet marketing, measuring the success of your activity is a must – you need to see how effective it is. You can measure all sorts of things, according to the success criteria that you set for yourself. It could be money you earn, profit you make, how many people respond or how many people start talking about your product.

As a company focussed on online marketing in Swindon, and the M4 corridor, we are helping businesses to measure their internet marketing activity and see the real value they are getting out of it. That is why we offer services such as our Pay on Results SEO service – you pay when you get the rankings in the search engines.

Many people struggle to measure their marketing activity and the success of it. Things such as dedicated telephone numbers for campaigns, specific email addresses for responses and even for the more adventurous, coupon codes.

With Internet Marketing there is one tool that we ensure that clients have set up right from the word go. Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free, web based, reporting tool that shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and information to help you improve their experience when they come back (or for future visitors).

If you tweet content and links to your site on Twitter, share links on Google+, send PR to websites and blogs for them to publish, write articles for article sites, send email marketing to your customers/subscribers, run pay per click campaigns… or any other form of Internet Marketing activity, you can use the standard reports or create custom reports to see how well all of this activity performs. If you are sell products, you can even attribute marketing campaigns to ecommerce spend so you can see which campaign works best on a revenue or profit basis.

Using this you can tweak and change your marketing activity to optimise the return you will get from it, put more time and money into activity that is working and even learn about activity that is producing no results so that you can stop it and save money and time.

If you haven’t got Google Analytics installed on your website, jump over to www.google.com/analytics and set up your account. You will need to follow the instructions to add a small piece of code to your site. If you are unsure how to do this, call us on 01793 608777 or get in touch via the above form and we will be happy to help install this for you.

If you have Google analytics installed and don’t know what it all means, watch this video from Google which explains it all:

Recent Updates To Google Analytics

As they are continuing to improve Google Analytics, features that will be available to everyone later this week will improve your experience and make crunching all those numbers even easier. And quicker! These updated reports will include:

• The ability to watch your reports load - a progress bar will show your the progress of your report loading
• Load reports only once – This will use the caching of data on your computer
• Control your report calculation – The ability to use “fast-access mode” which will letting you control the number of visits used to calculate reports

For the full update – check out the official Google Analytics blog here.