A Detailed Review of Google Analytics

To those engaged in the internet business, Google Analytics (GA) has probably been the most effective tool in optimizing their website’s statistics and tracking incoming traffic into one’s site. So, to take a deeper look, let’s check out what the newly reinvented Google Analytics has to offer:

1. Advanced Segmentation. Among the most useful features of Google Analytics is advanced segmentation, where you can activate segments such as Visits with Conversions and Paid Traffic. You can also create new custom segments using the segment builder, giving you more freedom to compare segment performance based on the categories that you need. To those who have long been using Google Analytics, this feature can definitely lead them to ways on how to optimize their site’s performance since the current and historic data can be thoroughly compared.
2. Motion Charts. Motion charts provide you with a multi-dimensional analysis on Google Analytics reports. You can select different metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubbly color, and then check out how they interact over time. You can also deselect those metrics you don’t find that important at present, and display data relationships which are not easily monitored in traditional reports.
3. Custom Reports. While most web analytics applications provide you with standard data reports, Google Analytics meanwhile does more than just provide you with information. It presents the information according to your needs, so that you can easily understand them. Your data is displayed according to how you want it to look with the help of a user-friendly interface which allows you to choose the metrics and get define multiple levels of sub-reports. You can change and reorganize these custom reports anytime you want.
4. Keyword and Campaign Comparison. Through this feature, you can check and compare your marketing materials ranging from paid links, keywords, ads, affiliate campaigns and email newsletters on different search engines such as Google.
5. Tracking Code. Probably the most popular feature, the Google Analytics tracking code can be pasted on your site’s pages so you can constantly monitor your site’s performance real time.
6. Adwords Integration. Since Google Analytics is integrated with AdWords, you can then search for the most profitable keywords that you can buy and use to promote your business over the web.
7. Benchmarking. Through benchmarking, you can gauge whether your metrics are producing positive or negative results to that of your industry vertical. You can then compare your key metrics against performance metrics without exposing your data to other sites.
8. Trend and Date Slider, GeoTargeting. By using these features, you can locate where the bulk of your visitors come from based on geographic locations and varying time zones without losing long term trends.
9. E-commerce Tracking. Meanwhile, you can identify your revenue sources and trace loyalty and latency metrics and transactions to campaigns and keywords via this feature. You can reach as far back as to when your site has started to become operational.
10. Email reports. What else completes Google Analytics but up-to-the-minute email reports?

With some of its previous site problems corrected, most users now find it much easier and efficient to use Google Analytics, since the features (especially the ones featured above) do serve their purposes at very minimal downtime. However, despite these new functions that provide outstanding benefits in tracking and monitoring our websites, Google Analytics can still be found with issues, including the following:

Delayed real time statistics. While Google Analytics sends up-to-date performance reports both on the site and on email, it still lacks sufficient capacity to deliver real time data. You can still observe delays in the delivery of reports and statistics, and these make it a little too difficult to gauge how your site is doing since you base your performance on the past, not the present. More and freer web statistics track site performance in real time, and hopefully Google Analytics gets to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Analytics and Advertising. There are rumors that Google uses analytic data to come up with more profitable advertising relevancy. Thus, this makes a steeper competition between you and the other sites in your niche, while Google is gaining all the profits. The only way you can keep yourself in good position when using Google Analytics is by sharing your traffic and conversion data with Google, which some bloggers find a little bit unfair.

However, despite these concerns, Google Analytics has proven itself to be a highly reliable web analytics application you can use in monitoring your site’s overall performance. Thus, given the new features and the ways on how you can compensate with the present drawbacks, Google Analytics remains to be the perfect analytics tool in today’s internet industry.