This is my first post that will attempt the interpreting of analytic data so bare with me . Please keep in mind I want to keep this way basic for the time being.

The goal of this post is to:

1) Show the importance and power of tracking your visitors
2) Show you how you can use the data to improve your website.
3) To keep it "really basic." If anything I would love to do a more detailed guide later on. For specific tasks and concepts.

For this post, it is assumed that:

1) You already have your Analytic tracking code installed
2) You have at least a little bit of data to play with.

Google Analytics

First of all, for those of you not familiar with Google Analytics, it is free website tracking software provided by Google to anyone with a website and a Google account. You can track as many websites as you like but I believe there is a limitation for how many visits per month can be tracked. I'm not sure of the limit but I know it is incredibly high and it is ignored if you have an AdWords campaign running.

So to begin, lets take a look at an incredibly simple query that will show us which pages our visitors leave our site from. I'll be working with data from a bogus old test blog.

Lets get started
First of all, go to Google Analytics and login to your account. Next we want to view the reports for the site you wish to analyze. (See below)

1.) Click on the "Content" tab of your navigation. (See image below, #1)
2.) Click on the "Top Exit Pages" link. (See image below, #2)
3.) The list will show in order your Top Exit Pages for your website. There are many things we need to take into consideration when looking at this list, but it gives us a fairly good overview of a handful of pages we can work on improving. (See image below, #3)
4.) The %exit column will show you the percentage of visitors that leave your site after viewing that particular page. As you can see the site below needs a lot of work . (See image below, #4)

Quick Recap
So I know this was a really short post, but I just wanted to get across how powerful this data can be, especially when you can read it. It allows you to track things you could have never known nor even guessed without tracking software and it allows you to make improvements that will help with the overall success of your site.

Keep an eye out, I'm going to try and create a few more of these posts that go into much greater detail with better examples. Let me know if there is anything in particular you would like me to cover. I'm constantly learning new stuff with Google Analytics, so I'm up to the challenge

And if you don't have any tracking software installed, make sure you do soon. It is free software so you have no excuse not to . Otherwise you may just be blindly making changes and adding things to your site.

Attached Images

G-Analytics.jpg (57.8 KB, 43 views)