Carson McComas recently discussed Google Analytics. “Key to any successful marketing campaign is figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Many companies relegate themselves to just observing if their sales volume goes up – a fairly downstream indicator of doing at least something right. However, it may take weeks (if not months) to notice a change in conversions to sales.
Enter Google Analytics: It’s free. It’s powerful. It gives you super-rich information. If you do commerce online, you’re insane not to be using this to measure.
You can use it to track simple traffic statistics, but you can also you use it (and here’s the real power) to track conversions and associated behavior. Though it integrates closely with your AdWords campaigns but can also track any marketing initiative you run, Google-based or not. It’s hard to overstate the power and importance of that.
It has great visual representations of your information, making it easily digestible. This includes graphs, charts, and a very nifty site-overlay showing you where and how people click through your site on their way to conversion Also, Geo-targeting map representations, date-range comparisons, and more.”
