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right so let's have a look at analytics, now
what is analytics? well first of all it used to be called web stats
short for web statistics
and that's basically what it means so
when we think analytical basically we're looking at studying data
now that sounds very dull so i apologize upfront but actually it's really
important
and it doesn't even need to be dull
because it's not really looking at noughts and one's it's looking at what's taking
place on your website
so why would we want to do that well that should be fairly obvious we want to
have a look at what's
happened so that we can predict what will
happen
okay as we start to change the website over time we can say
we did
this and achieved that as a result
so it shows us it's our dashboard
you know we wouldn't set off on a journey
and start driving to uh... you know across europe
uh... without having a dashboard on the car because when we are running low on
fuel we wouldn't get to see it
where we're heading down the
motorway section we wouldn't know how fast we're going
so this is all that analytics is
it's your dashboard to see what's actually taking place
on your online marketing
when i say online marketing it can now cover
not just what's happening on your website but you can tie in all the things to do
what's happening on your social media on your pay per click in all these different
things that you might be doing
okay so let's have a look
we talk about Google analytics a lot
so why
specifically Google analytics well first of all it's a free
tool from Google
now you can spend money
putting analytics on or you could even use basically web log type
statistics okay let me talk about those two first and then come back to why Google
analytics
so the web log type of uh... stacks they're very
very data
based so you don't get to see graphs of such its really looking at some
raw
data
and it's not always easy to interpret the data
so that's why then maybe not the best things
why would you want to pay for stats well if you pay for stats or analytics
you're certainly going to get some good information so that's why you might
want to pay for it but hold on
Google sits in the middle and takes the best of both
it's the same price as the web log stuff i.e its free of charge
and it's as good as the stuff that you would have paid for
okay so
we definitely want to be
looking at Google analytics and in fact for the rest of this section i'm going to be
speaking really about google analytics but because i'm talking about the
concept level and not the very detail
you can take the same information and use it with whatever package
you were using
so google analytics
what we need to be looking at here, is
trends rather than numbers
so let me try to explain that
if i said to you that you've got a hundred people come into your web site
this month
what does that mean?
but if i said to you you've got double the number of people come into your web site
this month and we had last month
immediately you can start to picture what that means it means you've done
something right it means
uh... s more people finding your website for whatever reason
so we need to look at trends rather than specific numbers because
if it's a hundred people come into your website that might be good
or it might be bad
there's no magic
number
you'll find out the numbers as you can
progress with your own you'll find out the numbers that are relevant to you
but it's not as anybody can say to you you need to get a thousand people
to your website because
it's irrelevant
so we need to follow
trends
okay and that's why google analytics has a lot of graphs in place
so you can actually visually see the lines taking place going up
hopefully
when they go down et-cetera we can see all of that happening
now what i would say before we get tied into all of the detail in the next
sections
within this module or all of our uh... the bounce rates and the time on sites
so what i want to say first is definitely keep it
simple
google analytics has so much information
you could spend
weeks upon weeks just studying information
but of course that's not helping you
we've got to keep it really simple
so as we go through the sections
in this module i want you to look at the things that might be particularly
relevant to your business
so it might be that your bounce rate which we will talk about shortly is a key
factor
in understanding whether
you're going to be successful so if that's the case then that becomes a key
metric
for you
that's a key performance indicator
if it's relevant to you
but you see for others that might not be uh... relevant at all
it might be to do with
exit pages but whatever it is and we're going to go through them
i want you to keep it simple i want you to pick out
the bits that are partticularly relevant to you and they
means something
to you and your sites
now i want you to keep it
very relevant
don't get drawn into all uh... simple metrics that don't mean anything
so keep it simple and keep it relevant
it's got to mean something to you and it's got to be simple
and that pretty much is Google
analytics or in fact any analytics
but from now on for the rest of the module
uh... you must see things relating to google analytics
but just bare in mind it could be any package we're talking about
concept levels