The day google bought Urchin i knew it had something up its sleeve. When it launched google analytics, I registered for an invite. At last google expanded its capacity and sent me an invitation to join google analytics. The setup procedure was pretty simple , its just asks you your name, url and then gives you a javascript to put on the site. Once you put this javascript on your site, just click on check status and it will detect if your homepage has the tracker, if it finds the tracker it will start recording your site’s info, like all google products, it relies heavily on Ajax and hence is terribly slow to start with and takes a minute to load on my 64 Kbps connection. Due to some problem ( i dont know what, it didnt work in my internet explorer, although i think this was probably due to some setting rather than incompatibility. The main USP of google is that its

FREE - You have to pay a lot of money to get a service as vast and powerful as this.

Content Summary

The first page (executive summary) shows you the the total number of visits and pageviews your site received, the average number of pageviews per visit (P/V), and the number of visits and pageviews over time, New v/s Returning visits (botched in my case as i only put the code 1 day ago), refferers (including search engines. The fourth element a map to show the cities from where people came didnt open in my case in all the browsers i tried(a large number).

The next page is conversion summary, it shows you how many of your visits actually conveted goals for you, goals is a new concept which i am still trying to understand how to implement.

The third one is the Marketing summary. It displays how did people get to your site (basically refferals), did they type your address , did they use a search engine or did they come from another site.

The fourth summary is the content summary, The first column (Entrances/Exits/Visits) shows the total number of entrances, exits, and visits for your top five entrance pages, exit pages, and visited pages, respectively. The second one shows top five exit pages. Pretty useful, you can see which content makes the visitor sit up and take notice and which content makes him want to leave your site.

The site overlay opens your site in a small window in the browser itself and then shows you how many people clicked on which links and what was the conversion rate.

Then come the reports, lots of them. You can view visitor’s by location, referring source, see how long they stayed, what content they enjoyed, what made them leave your site.

About the Author:

The author is Ankit Sud, owner of many website, chiefly http://tikna.blogspot.com For more interesting articles give him a visit.