Google Analytics Offers Holiday Analytics

If you get as geeked up over analytics as we do, then you’ll be interested to know that Google has a project called “Think Holiday.” http://www.google.com/thinkholiday/ It’s a pretty interesting portal that uses Google’s trending topics to present you a look into what consumers are thinking. For example this chart shows the growing interest in “Black Friday” over time: Or this table displaying the top trending searches for consumer electronics: With a little creative thinking you can use these trending topics to your advantage. For example, are you planning a holiday promotion? Find out what is the hot new thing this season to maximize the effectiveness. How else could you use this information to your advantage?

Web Analytics, Who Needs ‘em?

There are several ways for you to actually do the tracking. There are two applications that I recommend the most, they are WebTrends and Google Analytics. WebTrends comes at a cost, but has very robust conversion tracking metrics. WebTrends would be ideal for an e-commerce site or anyone wanting to track a specific conversion such as how many times a file has been downloaded or what is the rate of completed purchases in your shopping cart. Google Analytics on the other hand is free. It is lacking in some areas compared to WebTrends but still offers a great deal of depth in it’s tracking abilities. I would say that Google Analytics is ideal for most websites.

What can you learn from these analyses? Most people are aware of the basics such as number of visitors, number of visits, most popular pages served, etc. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. You can determine the geographic location of your visitors and even drill down to the city level. You can determine what content on your site is the most popular, how effective is your navigation, which browsers are visitors using, which operating system are they using, did they reach your site through a search engine, did they arrive through one of your pay-per-click ads, how long did they visit your site, which page did then enter on and which page did they exit from. There are many very useful measurements and many ways to slice and dice the information.

If your not tracking the effectiveness of your website, you need to start doing so today. Knowing this information will help you create a meaningful experience for your visitors and that will directly translate into more conversions, whether that means more profits from selling goods or more leads generated for your sales team.

I would like to end this post with a show of hands. How many of you are using an web analytics program? What are you using? How has the information you’ve learned made a positive impact on your business?