Learning Report 7
Google Analytics
Resource: http://www.google.com/analytics
What did I learn?
I learned about a powerful service provided by Google, called Google Analytics. This service tracks the visits that are made to your website, down to the specifics of how long they stay, where they are from, the course of navigation they take through your page, and lots of other helpful information. This kind of information can be very useful for developing your marketing strategy, and fine tuning the navigation and flow of your webpage to make easier to use, and more effective in accomplishing its purpose.
This tool is completely free (for up to 5 million visits a month) and super quick to implement, so it is a well worth it service that I would recommend to everyone. Google Analytics is a helpful service for any website, but I think it would be especially helpful for websites that are larger and more complex, or that contain online stores. Knowing that, I wanted to gain some experience with the tool while building this site so that I will prepared to use it when it is more important in the future.
How did I implement it?
As I mentioned before, setting up a Google Analytics is a very simple and quick process. To begin, you go to www.google.com/analytics and click on the link that says "set up an account." If your already have a gmail account they'll actually just link your Google Analytics account with that. Next they ask for your domain name, and for a bit of other information, and then will give you a bit of javascript code to insert into your page just before the closing </body> tag. You simply insert that onto each page that you want monitored (I would reccomend putting it on every page, just include in your wireframe), and then your ready to roll.
From there, you can check in as often as you like and view your page's stats. The Google Analytics site is very simple and intuitive to use, and the information is organized in a clear and helpful manner. I will definitely use it on all the websites that I have the opportunity to build.
