Google Analytics – a Consultant Needed?

I have previously written some articles on Web Analytics on topics such as Web Analytics & Cookies, Introduction of Google Analytics, improvement of website usability utilizing Web Analytics, SEO KPIs, Branding KPIs, and benefits of Web Analytics.

Given the growing importance of web measurement and the fact that the aforementioned articles seem to be some of the most popular posts on my blog, I decided to focus on writing some more tactical posts on setting up and implementing Google Analytics.

If you have a small and static website, setting up Google Analytics can be very easy and straight forward and you may not need a Web Analytics consultant especially if you are relatively tech savvy. A little bit of training on GA and you are good to go. However, if your site is complex, dynamic, offers e-commerce transactions or you need to measure traffic across multiple domains, sub-domains or third party shopping carts, you might need the help from a Google Analytics consultant.

Before you choose Google Analytics as your Web Analytics application of choice, you may consider some of the features GA has to offer:

Language – Google Analytics interface currently supports over 24 languages.

Scalability – Google Analytics can support both small and large sites. However, there are some limitations in terms of number of goals you can set (currently limited to 4 goals per profile). In addition, in cases of high traffic websites, some of GA stats are shown based on data sampling.

Even though Google Analytics has made web analytics affordable for small businesses, GA also offers some sophisticated features helpful to enterprise level websites.

Integration with Google AdWords – in just few steps you can easily integrate your Google AdWords PPC campaign with your Google Analytics and start measuring your AdWords pay-per-click campaign performance without the need to tag every single keyword, ad copy, ad group an campaign.

Campaign Reporting – whether you would like to measure your Google AdWords performance, your PPC campaign on Yahoo or MSN adCenter, e-mail marketing, web advertising, your social media initiative or offline marketing campaigns, Google Analytics can.

Funnel Visualization – if your audience need to path a funnel to become a lead or customer, you need to monitor and optimize your funnel on an ongoing basis to increase your conversion rate. GA’s funnel visualization report just does that.

Customizable Dashboard – if you need a quick overview of some of the most important key performance indicators, you can set your dashboard up so that you can have a bird’s eye view of your site performance in a glance.

Cross-Segmentation – Google Analytics allows you segment your traffic by different criteria and compare the performance of different segments.

Measuring PDFs and Virtual Page Views – Google Analytics allows you to measure how many times your PDF files are being downloaded by creating virtual pageview and track back the downloads to the contributing campaigns.

Event Tracking – In some cases, you may need to track certain events and actions to see how your audience interact with your interactive elements of your site such as videos and flash files. GA makes this easy for you through its event tracking feature.

Internal Site Search Reporting – this is one of the most useful yet least utilized feature of Google Analytics. Internal site search reports give you insight into the mind of your audience and can help you optimize your website usability and product offerings.

Automated Reporting – Too busy to remember to login and check your website performance? Set up, schedule and share reports automatically.

I will try to cover some of these features as well as some more advanced Google Analytics set up techniques in the feature posts.

Nima Asrar Haghighi – Google Analytics Consultant, Toronto