So, the ladies and gentlemen at Giraffe have asked me why Google Analytics is the greatest thing to have been invented. But surely other things including chocolate pudding, ice cream, the internet and jet planes are better? I guess there’s a huge variety of opinions for this broad question though.
In terms of web analytics though, I believe Google’s package is by far the best offering. Why do I think this? First, its free to use, unlike many similar tools, including those from big technological names such as Adobe and IBM. However, it should be noted that if your organisation has over ten million website and/ or requires training and account management support, then an upgrade to the premium version will be required, costing a whopping £90,000 per year.
Second, the tool, after a small amount of tuition, is easy to use. This is especially useful for someone like myself who’s just starting out in the fast paced world of Digital Marketing. In under two minutes, you can log in, select what type of data you want to analyse, whether it be conversions to other websites or the pattern of behaviour of visitors and choose the two dates you want to assess data between.
This data on Google Analytics is vast. It includes the total number of visits and unique visitors to a website, the number of page views, average visit duration and the average number of pages seen per visit. Wait, there’s more, as you can also get data on the search terms used to access the website that’s being monitored and the websites and social networks which brought traffic to your organisation, more commonly known as a referral.
Plus, it is easy to integrate into your website. All you have to do is add a section of code populated by Google into every web page you or your company would like to track.
Alex Blakey
