The Ultimate Analysis

Recently released in its fifth incarnation, Google Analytics (GA) is the most widely-used website statistics service in the world. Currently, the service is in use on just under 50% of the top 1,000,000 websites as ranked by the web information company Alexa.

Version five contains all that made the previous versions so successful, in addition to an array of new and updated features. Old reports stopped working in June of this year and so updating to the new ones is now vital. Brickweb use GA extensively as part of our work and here we review some of the popular features of the fifth version.

A particularly useful feature is the plot row system. The graph running along the top of a GA report makes spotting trends in website traffic simple and is invaluable in showing how patterns change over time. The plot rows are a new function that enable two rows of data to be graphed alongside one another and compared to overall traffic which means our understanding of a website’s traffic flow becomes a simple matter.

The popular engagement goals feature, used by GA since 2009 to track a particular visitors depth and time spent on the site, has been extended with event goals. These are able to track a visitor in more detail as they are not confined solely to page viewing actions. Including things like downloaded PDF files and amount of time a user spends watching video or interacting with a Flash object, event goals offer unrivalled in-depth visitor information.

At the hub of the GA experience is the dashboard. Bringing everything together in one place, it puts any piece of information required directly at the user’s fingertips. Version five features multiple dashboards and droppable widgets enabling the creation of truly personalised reports. Our testers at Brickweb particularly enjoyed the addition of the multiple dashboard feature, finding it incredibly powerful and effective whilst being clear and precise to use.

Social media has become an incredibly important part of the way in which people access websites. It can be a difficult task to track events on a website that amounts to a bridge between on and off-site activity. GA version five contains a social section enabling identification of visitors from social media websites, helping with better comprehension of traffic from these sites. Social media marketing can then be tailored to better suit the intended audience.

Overall, we found the new and updated features to be fantastic additions to an already superior product. GA means we can accurately track visitors and adapt our strategies accordingly, providing the very best service for your business and website.

A custom web design, E-commerce websites marketing and SEO agency in Lancashire, Brickweb are fully conversant with many strategies for improving your website’s traffic and thus its performance. To know more about our use of GA or any other aspect of our internet marketing work or to try it for yourself, please contact a member of our dedicated team.

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