With Google Analytics, there are no more reasons not to measure!

Even though this free tool has been in existence for two years now, and a day doesn’t go by without an article discussing the importance of measuring on the web, many companies still don’t adequately measure their site’s results. Some even come to us saying things like: “my number of hits went up a lot recently…that must be good!” You can imagine that we have a few basic notions to re-examine since the number of hits you get is not that reliable a factor!

I am therefore taking advantage of the launch of a new version of Google Analytics (a few months ago…it’s true) to focus on the importance of setting good performance indicators and regularly keeping track of them. Whether it’s for an eCommerce site, for ‘lead generation’ or a promotional micro-site, you can always set performance indicators adapted to your objectives.

With over thirty implementations of Google Analytics over recent months, here are some comparisons we use for our site and some of our clients’. Some were misunderstood or ignored before and are more prominent in the new version of Google Analytics.

Compare to the site average

This indicator is the most useful when you want to know the quality of a campaign or a site that refers to yours. You can analyze the quality of visitors from various sources according to the number of times they visited the site or a more precise objective.

Therefore, by analyzing traffic to Adviso’s website, we can see that the visitors who stay the longest are the readers of our ‘The Checkpoint’ newsletter, or those using RSS Netvibes. However, visitors from the Branchez-Vous portal and those who come directly to the site are more likely to take action.

Compare commercial links and natural results

Do you ever wonder if you have got your money’s worth with your keyword purchases? Although you probably invest a substantial proportion of your budget with the providers of this wonderful tool, this comparison may give a less flattering image to Google Adwords results.

Conversion rates of Adviso’s visitors from natural results that download a document are around 1.5%, compared to 0.2% from commercial links. Since our keyword purchasing campaign is on a very small scale and mostly for testing purposes, we haven’t stopped buying them. However, we completely modified the strategy and allocation of some of our clients’ budgets when they got similar results.

Compare your adverts and newsletter

Products like ‘adservers’ and tools to send e-mails usually provide interesting data on clicks when you do A/B tests on banner or newsletter content. However, they are even more interesting when you can see what people do on the site following their click.

During a test carried out on our newsletter a few months ago, we noticed that the number of pages visited on the site following a click in our ‘Checkpoint’ newsletter was over 2.87 pages on average for a newsletter sent at 13:00 compared to 5.39 pages for the same newsletter send two hours earlier, at 11:00. This information is always extremely useful.

Although this article only touches on a small part of what you can do with Google Analytics, I hope it will entice those who haven’t yet used this measurement tool to take action – the results speak for themselves!