Google Analytics is an important tool to discover how people are finding your website – and once they are there, how long they are staying and which pages they are looking at.

What Information Will I Get?

Looking at the Google Analytics dashboard will give you a graph of visits to your website over time (by day, week or month).  You can choose which reports to display on your dashboard.  You can also set up reports to be delivered to you by email.  Use Google Analytics to see which pages were viewed, how long people spent on the page and whether they left the site from that page without clicking on another page (bounce rate).  Identify which websites people came to the page from and how many repeat visitors you had.

It is generally better to look at trends rather than individual visits.  Using the information from Google Analytics you can identify trends – for example, which pages are ‘sticky’ (keeping visitor interest), which pages encourage visitors to explore other areas of the site and which pages are generally entry / exit pages.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site without visiting any other page except the page on which they arrived at the site (the landing page).  A high bounce rate can indicate that the landing page is not relevant to the visitor, but it is important to put this into context.  A high bounce rate on your ‘contact page’ may simply mean that the visitor has obtained the information that they need.  In general, it is a good idea to keep an eye on bounce rate, in conjunction with the number of new versus returning visitors and the content of the pages that have a high bounce rate.

Do you use Google Analytics to see who is visiting your website, what they are clicking on and how long they are staying?

Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that is aimed primarily at marketers (or small business owners perhaps) as opposed to web designers.  Using Google Analytics I can see, for example:

• How people found my website (directly, using search engines, from Twitter, from LinkedIn or from other sites).
• Which pages were most popular and how long people stayed on the site.
• Which keywords were used in search engines to find me – and how often.
• Most visits this month were the day after an introduction to Twitter training course that I gave.

This is all valuable information to monitor your marketing, your Search Engine optimisation and your visibility.  You may also get ideas on changes that you might need to make to your content or site navigation.  At a more advanced level you can set targets, track your Google Adwords, benchmark against similar industries/websites and monitor your geographical reach by city.

How Do I Start with Google Analytics?

• You need to sign up with Google.
• You need to sign up with Google Analytics.  You will be given code that needs to be put into the bottom of your home page.  You may want to ask your webdesigner to do this.  It will probably take about 24 hours before the changes are displayed in Google Analytics.
• You will only be able to use the benchmarking capabilities if you agree to share data with others.  Google states that they keep data confidential.
• Now login to Google Analytics.
• Choose your website which is listed and click View report to view the dashboard

How accurate is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics tracks users by storing cookies on their computer.  If a visitor deletes their cookies frequently they will be treated as a new visitor each time they view your site.  Some people do block all cookies.  These visits will not be tracked.  Google Analytics can track visits from mobile browsers if the mobile browser can run Java.

Google documents is a free Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form and data storage service offered by Google.  There is also a paid version, Google Premier, which can work out cheaper than using Microsoft products.

Why Would a Business use Google Documents?
Apart from the obvious advantage of being free, the main difference between Google Documents and other applications (Microsoft, Open Office, etc) is that it is web based and supports collaboration.  Using Microsoft Office, if you wanted to work on a spreadsheet with a colleague or partner who is in a separate office, you would need to make a change and then email the document.  Using Google Documents you can both see the spreadsheet using the internet (via computer or mobile phone) and changes can be made and seen in real time.

How Easy Is It To Use?
The Google Documents interface is intuitive to use at a standard level of use, but complex functionality needs additional effort.  In the word processor, tables, bullets, and text works in a similar way to other tools.  Images are less flexible.  The spreadsheet has a comprehensive set of functions and graphing tools but pivot tables are more complex.  The presentation tool can create basic slides but struggles with master slides, transitions, animations etc.  Add-ins are available to extend the more basic functionality – but these come at a cost in terms of time to learn.  In all of the applications, changes that are made are stored automatically and regularly.  It is useful to be able to view a history of changes to each document.

Who uses Google Documents?
There are a number of large and small businesses who have moved all their applications over to Google to reduce costs by using the Premier version that is only $50 per user, per year.  This offers more storage space per account, phone support, email retention. Google Apps now has 50 million users (1 million are paid users).  This is small compared to Microsoft, but the numbers are increasing.

Sounds great …. but?
To use Google documents extensively, users have to learn a new interface and will need to get used to sharing documents rather than emailing them.  Any old documents will need to be migrated – not as easy as it might sound.  There are potential security issues inherent with any documents that are stored on the internet rather than your own server, but Google is working to overcome these.  There are reports of the support being forum focused rather than being able to talk your problems through with somebody.  Google are working to improve their application software with the aim of competing directly with Microsoft.

Summary
Personally, I plan to stick with Microsoft products at the moment – they do have a cost associated with them, but their ease of use, extensive functionality and interoperability suits me at the moment.  However, whenever I want to collaborate with other people on a presentation, document or spreadsheet, I will use Google Documentss.  Collaboration tends to need fairly simple functionality and the advantage of being able to update in real time is enormous.  What do you think?