My conclusion first: This is the best ever analytical tool you’ve ever saw, helps you to understand better your visitors and their behavior. I mean organic and PPC. This is the only tool shows you organic conversations! Don’t use Google Analytics if you’re spammer, or black hat SEO! Click here if you do.
Word of Warning: Ask yourself if you want Google to know that much about you and your company. Do you really want to share your revenue information with a company that also wants your advertising dollars? Do you want to share your revenue information with any other company at all? Google officials have declined that they will use the data to better understand how much you are willing to pay for ads, based on conversions. They also claim that they do not plan to tap into the data as a means of improving regular search results or to identify bad sites. Nevertheless, these things are easily possible if you use Google Analytics.
“Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web. With over 80 reports, your free Google Analytics account will track visitors through your site, and will keep track of the performance of your marketing campaigns – whether they’re AdWords campaigns, email campaigns, or any other advertising program. With this information, you’ll know which keywords are really working, which ad text is the most effective, and where your visitors are dropping off during the conversion process. Don’t be fooled by the fact that this functionality is available to you for free – Google Analytics is a full-featured, powerful analytics package. AdWords advertisers can find all of these benefits from within their AdWords account – Google Analytics has been fully integrated with AdWords. All of your reports and settings are available from the Analytics tab.” Google.com
Several useful features make it easy to pin down overall trends as well as to trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and identify your revenue sources. A unique feature facilitates the identification of critical pages and bottlenecks where you are likely to loose most of your online customers. The feature, called Funnel Visualization, shows you the bottlenecks in your conversion and checkout processes – attributable to such factors as confusing content or maze-like navigation – so you can eliminate or work around them, and start “funneling” visitors through the steps you want them to effectively take.
Another great feature, pioneered commercially by Clicktracks, is Site Overlay which allows Google Analytics to superimpose visitors and clickthrough data to your individual pages, giving you the ability to see exactly which links on each page are clicked, and with which relative percentages.
Google Analytics comes also with well over 80 predefined reports to analyze your data. Advanced Visitor Segmentation adds eighteen predefined segments for further drill-down into any of these reports, such as geographic location and new versus returning visitors.
