Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring traffic to and within your website, but it can also appear overwhelming at first glance. There’s such a wealth of information available through Google Analytics but unless you know what you’re looking for and how to access that data, you won’t get much out of implementing an analytics package like Google Analytics.

Last week Google debuted an upgraded version of Google Analytics (v5), and anyone with a Google Analytics account can now view the old version or the new version. In order to access the new Google Analytics, simply click on new version next to your email address on the top right corner of the page. While Google is still in the process of pulling all the old features over to the new version of GA, the new version seems to be working just fine and there are even a few new features to go along with the redesign and reorganization.

You could spend months learning all the ins and outs of Google Analytics, but here are some of the most important things to look for when you’re tracking visitors on your website using Google Analytics.

The Basics

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

When you first log into Google Analytics you’ll see the Visitors Overview that includes stats like Visitors, Pageviews, Time on Site and Bounce Rate. The Visitors and Unique Visitors numbers are important because it lets you know how many people have come to your site during the time frame you’re looking at and you then know approximately how many of those visitors have been to your site before. Pages per Visit lets you know the average number of pages each visitor goes to while on your site. Don’t think that just because you have a high Pages per Visit number it means your visitors are happy with your site and they’re getting what they wanted from your site. I’ve seen instances where a campaign caused Pages per Visit and Time on Site to drop, but have dramatically increased conversion rates. As much information as Google Analytics provides you, it still requires old fashioned individual user research or surveys to find out users sentiments.

The term Bounce Rate can be confusing. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that only view one page (the page they landed on first) and then exit your blog. In general, you want as low a bounce rate as possible, but much like the Pages per Visit and Time on Site metrics, a bounced visitor isn’t necessarily an unsatisfied visitor. If your website is more informational in general (many Local, State and Federal Agencies have more informational than sales or conversion goals), a higher bounce rate might not be a bad thing. But for most organizations the goal of your website is likely to sell a product, ticket, room night, service or something along those lines. If you notice high bounce rates for pages where you’re specifically selling an item or asking the user to take an action (sign up for an email newsletter or download a whitepaper), you should make some modifications to the page that could help lower the bounce rate.

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At the most recent breakfast hosted by Indy Social Media, Douglas Karr of DK New Media talked about Analytics and Measurement of the Social Web (check out a UStream of Doug’s presentation here). It was a great presentation and the thing that stuck out to me the most was when Doug mentioned how inaccurate analytics software was when it comes to social referrals.

For the most part, by looking at your analytics software (I’ll use Google Analytics for example, since it’s what I use and it’s free), you can click on the Referring Sites section and see how many visitors came to your website from Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare and other social sites, but the real fly in the ointment is Twitter. You’ll see Twitter.com in your Referring Sites section, but it’s likely that you’re getting more visits from Twitter than just the ones you see.

The visits you see from Twitter.com are just that – they’re only visits made by people clicking on your link while looking at their Twitter accounts on Twitter.com. In fact, Mashable just reported that Twitter just announced that 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices – an astounding number. This only underscores the importance of making sure you can track all Twitter traffic accurately. Currently, you won’t see mobile or desktop applications like TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic show up in your analytics data. So, there’s a large group of visitors that you may not be properly attributing to Twitter.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track your web stats, it’s actually pretty easy to begin capturing all of your referrals from Twitter. We’ll be using Google Analytics Campaign tracking codes to do this. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic Campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name
• utm_source: The source for the link (HootSuite, TweetDeck, TwitterFeed, Email Newsletter)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (email, search, social media, twitter, facebook, etc.)

For example, if I wanted to point people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, I would post this link on Twitter from TweetDeck: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But to more accurately track those visitors from Twitter I’ll append the following data to the URL above:

?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interview

So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interviews. Nice long URL, huh? Not to worry, your standard URL shortener will compress all that to a nice small URL to post to Twitter (http://bit.ly/fwzSam).

Now, next time you log into Google Analytics, look under Traffic Sources then Campaigns and you can search for all the campaigns you ran through Twitter and find out how many people clicked through. You can even have one Campaign with different links you post to Twitter, Facebook, Email and other mediums and all you have to change is the utm_medium or utm_source parameters.

The best part is you don’t have to remember how to add all the parameters to your links, just check out Google’s free URL Builder and it will create the URLs for you. In fact, if you use TwitterFeed to push your blog posts through to Twitter or HootSuite to manage your social media presence, you can set up their baked-in URL shorteners to automatically append analytics tracking data.

TwitterFeed:

Log in, and either create a new feed or edit an existing feed. On Step 2, you can add services to push your feeds to, add or edit one of your Twitter services to see the ability to add UTM Tags.

I really like the ease of using TwitterFeed because there are several options they allow and you can push your feed to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. The ability to add in custom tracking parameters is a real plus.

HootSuite:

HootSuite is just as easy. When you’re logged in, click in the box where you add a URL to shorten, Then click on the down arrow to the left of the Shrink button. Select Custom URL Parameters and you can fill out either one-time parameters or you can add parameters in as a default. Now these parameters will be added to the end of any link you shorten through HootSuite.

If you selected the Always apply when creating Ow.ly links box, the parameters will be appended to every link you create, so if you’re linking to external websites, they’ll see your tracking code on their site as well, but as long as it’s included on links to your site, that’s what really matters.

Hopefully this brief walk-through helps you to start tracking more of your visits from Twitter. Have you noticed that your referrals from Twitter didn’t look as strong as you expected them to?

One of the most important things you can do online today is tracking your web traffic with some type of robust web analytics package. At the Indiana Office of Tourism Development, we primarily use Google Analytics. It’s free, relatively easy to set up and enables us to track just about everything we need for our website and blogs. By analyzing the data culled from Google Analytics, we’re able to see whether some of our new marketing in initiatives are driving people to our website, whether a redesigned homepage had an effect on website visitors and whether our social media efforts are enticing users to visit our website.

The bottom line is if you have a website, you NEED to be tracking it.

Luckily, Google Analytics is in the process of launching two new features that will help make their service even more usable and robust.

A few weeks ago, Google unveiled their “Intelligence” feature and it’s a great addition to Google Analytics. As you can see in the video below, Intelligence looks at all of your web data and automatically flags data it considers important.

For example, during our recent Leaf Cam campaign we sent out our Big Idea Email (sign up to receive it here!) and experienced a 52% increase in website traffic from the day before. Google Intelligence noticed that along with 36 other alerts. Some of those alerts were a 75% increase in visitors from Kentucky, a 62% increase in entries to one of our Leaf Cam Contests and a 90% increase in visits to our Leaf Cam page (click on the image below for a larger version).

Google automatically creates alerts for many things, but if you specifically want an alert every time something specific happens, you can set up custom alerts as well. The custom alerts can even be emailed to you as they occur. These alerts are great for pinpointing changes in visitor’s actions on your website, but what if you want to know what factors contributed to those changes in your webstats? That’s where Google Analytics’ second great feature comes into play.

Google is still rolling this feature out to all GA accounts, but it will allow for you to make annotations on any data. For example. We launched our redesigned homepage on May 4th, 2009. There are 80 Intelligence Alerts for May 4, 2009 ranging from a 15% drop in new visitors to the site to a 30% increase in the average Time On Site per visitor. All I have to do is create a notation on May 4th so we can always know that we’re seeing those changes due to the redesign of our homepage. I can also set up notations for days that we send out our consumer or industry emails, note days when we’ve begun a new PR push or ad campaign or days when a news story came out that pushed traffic to our site.

Check out the video on Google Analytics Annotations below:

All in all, these two new features on Google Analytics give users a tremendous amount of flexibility with their web data.