Google Analytics: Tells you About your Website Visitors By Angela Tang, Maria Chin

An organization’s website introduces the organization to the billions of Internet users worldwide and showcases its strengths and achievements. Therefore, it would be crucial to find out who the audiences are and if the information being put up on the website is useful and interesting to them; basically whether the target audience can easily find the information they need and revisit the website for more, thus creating opportunities for further development e.g. alliances, business.

For City University, the University Homepage (http://www.cityu.edu.hk) is the University’s main web access gateway. Students and staff visit the homepage for University news, access to electronic administrative, academic and communication services, and navigation to departmental information. Apart from internal users, its visitors may include scholars and academics worldwide, prospective students and their parents, alumni, media, guests, causal web surfers, etc. The continuous update and improvement of the Homepage with visitors’ interests in mind is essential, for example enhancing user experience by having stylish, quick links to current interests and events.

In the past, visitors’ usage and preferences are analyzed by compiling usage reports (see bar chart below) from data collected in the web server access logs which is a tedious process.

This task has been made a lot easier with the implementation of Google Analytics (a free Web 2.0 tool provided by Google). Google Analytics provides easy-to-read and user customizable tables and charts to help us correlate visitors’ usage patterns, say the total number of visits of a website, top visited web pages and the duration of visits. It even provides general demographic information of your visitors. See diagrams below for a preview of Google Analytics.

The web interface of Google Analytics is handy which enables you to monitor your website usage anywhere anytime. Most of all, no programming knowledge is required; you can focus your effort on enhancing your website with the information obtained from the analytic reports without having to worry about how to use the tool.

To start using Google Analytics, please visit http://www.google.com/analytics where you can apply for a free account. You will be then be given tracking codes to be inserted into your web pages you wish to monitor. With the tracking codes inserted, you will be able to see your website usage on the following day by logging in the Google Analytics account.