Google Analytics Overview
I’m going to talk about the obvious benefits of google analytics over the free server side software called awstats. I have people banging on about analytics but never got round to setting mine up until a couple of days ago, the long part which you only have to do once thankfully is insert a snippet of code to every page on your site. Most of my site has been designed to include a footer on each page so all I had to do was add the code into my footer file and it will automatically be assigned to all my other pages, the pages that have there own separate footer you have to manually go through them and add the analytics code just before the tag </body>.
Google will update you’re analytics data once every 24 hours and the information it displays is more useful than any other software I have used.
To increase sales on most websites you need to get your users to visit your sales page so they can convert into an order and google analytics shows you your most popular pages so you can start to implement tweaks and techniques to get your user to your sales page.
The information google provides about your site and pages is valuable so its worth setting yourself up with an analytics account as soon as possible.
Before analytics I used to use awstats which does have a couple more snippets of data than analytics but googles analytics is much more superior over all. The other feature I like about analytics is it provides a lot of data on your visitors and what they do on your site and where they go. It tells you the most popular links on each page which is good to know so you can optimize your pages a bit more to increase the users experience and hopefully increase sales.