How Google Analytics Can Help You Optimize Your Website

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

Google Analytics is a free web-based metrics solution offered by Google. You can use Google Analytics to help you optimize your website. You’ll have to insert the Google Analytics code into the page of your website so you can traffic important details about traffic and entrance / exit pages.

Three important tools that are a part of Google Analytics, which can help you optimize your website, are:

• Entrance Sources
• Entrance Keywords
• Site Overlay

All three tools can be found under the Content tab in Google Analytics.

Entrance Sources
First, check your entrance sources. Where is your traffic coming from? If you see more of your traffic coming from other websites and social networks than from search engines then it could mean that your pages are not optimized well enough to receive the traffic that you are looking for. It could mean that you need to work on optimizing those pages for web traffic.

Entrance Keywords
Next, you want to look at the keywords people use to search and find your site in the search engines. Are those the keywords you are targeting? If not then your site may not be optimized for those keywords enough to be found in the search engines.

Site Overlay
The Site Overlay is a useful tool. You can actually have your stats overlaid on your site so that you can see which of your links are the most clicked. You can use the Site Overlay to evaluate clicks, transactions, revenue, and goals.

Another way you can use Google Analytics to help you optimize your site is by using it with Google AdWords, the pay per click service run by Google. By using Google Analytics to help you find the most profitable keywords for your site, you can then use those keywords to help you build web pages that will draw in traffic through search engine optimization, search engine marketing and convert more traffic into sales.