Monitoring ROI Effectively with Google Analytics

Google analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google to measure the traffic to a Web site. GA tool lets you see where the visitors come from, how they interact with your Web site and how many of them actually convert into prospective customers. With this tool, you can also identify the pages that have been the most popular and the least popular. . Web analytics is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO); hence SEO consultants find GA tool very useful to prepare a statistical analysis of the Web site.

Web site traffic filtering tools give insight into the issues involved in marketing a Web site. Internet marketing companies rely on the information given by the GA tool to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their marketing strategies. GA tool gives a comprehensive view of the traffic generated to a Web site. It gives detailed information about visitors from different sources including various search engines, display advertising, email marketing and pay-per-click advertising or PPC marketing. This information is crucial because it allows SEO consultants to identify the marketing strategy that works better for a particular Web site.
Google Analytics is now integrated with AdWords. With this, GA tool allows better monitoring of return on investment (ROI) of a Web site automatically without having to import the details such as cost or tag keywords. The new tool, which appears as a tab under the AdWords account, has options such as executive, marketer, and Web master dashboards. It gives quick summaries of the Web traffic, PPC management and e-commerce on a dashboard view. If you want to see in-depth view, you may refer the detailed report set.
There are many tools in GA to help you improve your Web site traffic and ROI. For example, with the help of the option ‘funnel visualization' you can identify the poorly performing Web pages. With GeoTargeting, you can trace your visitors on a geographical map. Advanced features include custom visitor segmentation with more than 80 reports.
Google Analytics filter ensures privacy of Web sites. Google has adopted appropriate measures to prevent any outsider intrusion to the Web analytics data. The service is subject to the industry leading privacy policy applied to all other Google services. Users are allowed to add up to 50 Web site profiles. The free service is limited to Web sites that generate less than 5 million page views per month, unless they are linked to at least one active AdWords account.

Shilpi is associated as Internet marketing manager with IDS Logic, an outsourcing firm in India, providing web based solutions and offshore outsourcing services to global clients.