Google Analytics is a very powerful reporting tool with a huge amount of information that can tell you how many visits your website gets, where they are coming from and what they are doing when they get there.

To access Google Analytics, go to www.google.com/analytics and login using the Google account name (which will be an email address ) and password provided to you (typically by your web developer who would have set it up as part of the site set up).

Not sure if you have analytics installed? See How to tell if you have Google Analytics installed

Key website statistics and how to get them

1. Visits – how many people come to your site

This is what you see when you first login to Analytics:

• View by day, week, month or hour
• Segment your data into traffic sources or by custom variables, using Advanced Segments
• You can get Google Analytics reports sent to your inbox each month. Here's How

2. Traffic Sources - where are they coming from?

How many of your site visitor come to your site from Google and referrals sites (where you have advertising or other promotional content)?

You can find this out under 'Traffic Source'

1. Will give you visit numbers for all sources

2. Referral sites - visits from those that have a link to yours. If you are advertising on another site such as a business directory, this will tell you how many visits were sent to you.

3. Visits from the search engines and will combine paid and organic. Click on organic (4) to just see the result of your SEO efforts.

This will also show you the keywords people entered into Google that lead to a visit to your website. 'Not provided' are keywords that are encrypted. People who are logged into Google will have their keyword searches encrypted.

Change the primary dimension to 'Source' to see a search engine breakdown (ie Google, Yahoo, Bing etc)

5. Will show you visits from social networks like Facebook

This is one way to measure the results of your social media activity. In this section you can set up conversions so that you can see how many of those visits from social media sites resulted in sales, signups or other goal.

3. Keywords - the language of your visitors

What search phrases are people using when they go into Google to look for something they want, and that subsequently led to a visit to your site - and are they the ones you want?!

These can be found from the Traffic Sources report described above.

then, click on 'Organic' search and it will display the keywords. You can also access this information from the Traffic Sources Overview report and by selecting Keyword as the 'Primary Dimension'.

You can filter this data to exclude your company name (for example).

4. Content

The Content section of Google Analytics can tell you a lot about what content is more appealing to your visitors prior to any conversion taking place.

Within the content section of Analytics you will find:

• What pages are the most popular and how long do they stay there (in Site Content – All Pages)

• Average page load times (in Site Speed – Overview) Check under Page Timings to see if any particular page is slow

• Site Search if you have one

• Events if you have event tracking setup

• Experiments – this is where you setup Google Content Experiments to compare two different versions of a page to see which one is more successful

• In page analytics shows you a shot of your site and how many people click on links and menu items, giving you a quick view of the most popular sections of your site and how they get there. In the image below, we can quickly see that 29% of visits to this page clicked on 'Book Online' - providing a baseline to try and improve.

5.Conversions

Conversions is where the rubber hits the road, and you start to see how your website is really doing!

Measuring and reporting on conversion rates is covered in our post Conversion Rates – what are they and how do you report conversions in Google Analytics?

Analytics may seem dull to many, who will say they know if the tills are ringing and the sales are coming through, but this data will give you vital information about which part of the website and which promotional channels are really giving you bang for buck!