What is Google Analytics?

Analytics, by textbook definition, means "the science of logical analysis". This pretty much means using common sense when analyzing something. Website analytics applies to people who own sites, or marketers, and more, but let's focus on the marketers group right now. Google happens to offer a service called "Google Analytics" for those marketers.

Google Analytics

There is a service offered by a popular site, Google, that gives the user very descriptive details about the visitors (rather, the visitors computers) when they enter a site. This service is called Google Analytics. The main advantage of this service is that it's shooting for marketers, (people or companies that sell things, services, or time online, in this sense) rather than going for technologists and webmasters, where the origin of web analytics stems from.

Google Analytics tracks all your visitors that were referred, meaning sent to your site, by search engines, display advertisements (such as banners), pay-per-click sites (where people get paid to click on ads), marketing through emails, and links within written documents.

Adwords

Adwords are advertisements attached to keywords. Meaning, if you're looking for "gardening" on a search engine, any ad with the keyword "garden" will show up for your search. Users who have Google Analytics can check their online success by tracking the quality of the landing page (the page that the advertisement takes the visitor to, maybe your homepage or another page on your site) and their goals. (Also known as "conversions", meaning how many people they can "convert" from lookers to buyers). Goals may contain sales, viewing a certain page or blog, downloading something specific from your site, anything you choose your goals to be. By using these goals and Google Analytics, marketers can decide which ads are bringing in the most customers, therefore cutting down on advertising costs and/or the maintenance time it takes to keep them running.

Dashboard

A dashboard is almost like a control panel for your analytics. Imagine that analytics is like your car, the dashboard is all the meters behind the steering wheel, telling you all about the mechanism without you having to get into the nitty-gritty part. Through Google , you can determine which pages are successful and which ones are failing based on where the customers came from (on the web, what referred them to your site), how long they lingered on one specific page or product, their geographical location, among other things.

Users of Google Analytics can benefit from the option to add up to 50 profiles for the site. This usually means one website for every profile. It is normally restricted to pages that have less than 5 million views per month.

Possible Complications with Google Analytics and Google

Here's a problem with Google - they're ok with your account on Google Analytics remaining free, up until you reach a certain point. Meaning after you start getting a regular certain number of customers, you have to start paying. But you can have as many adwords up to advertise your site, and get millions of customers, and its free. Does Google have an underlying payment system in this?

The marketer has to realize that if they get Google Analytics to take care of the website analytics, that is allowing Google to see everything that marketer has worked so hard for: what the customers are paying for, what they're visiting, how long they're visiting, their location everything. So by letting Google Analylitics take care of the tedious part of your site, you're actually providing them with all the information they need, and at a certain number of visitors, you're paying them to receive that information.

This can be used against you - Google will put their business first before anyone else's; isn't that how anyone is able to build their company? The prices on Google are not randomly generated, they are created using analytics to determine what people are buying the most and what people see as valuable.

This is not Anti-Google, only meaning to point out both sides of the quarter. Read any contract before signing up; if you don't understand, ask questions!