Website analytics is a tool that provides important data concerning the visitors to a website, how they interact with the site, and even details that can help increase traffic. While most website hosting provides an ‘analytics package’, such as AWStats or Webalizer, the reporting and data provided is fairly crude. Google provides a free, professional-quality analytics package that is easily incorporated into almost any website.
For political campaign websites, it’s definitely worth knowing where your site visitors are coming from and what they are doing on your site.
To set up an account for Google Analytics, visit www.google.com/analytics. You will be asked to sign in to your Google Account or to create a new Account if you don’t have one.
Click the ‘Create Website Profile’ link to add a new website. You’ll be given the choice to add a Profile for a new domain or for an existing domain. You’ll usually start with new domain.
Below that, provide Google with the URL of the site you wish to add. You will also have the option of applying cost data from your Adwords account (if you have one set up under the same account).
Click Finish.
Google will provide you with a block of tracking code. Copy this, as you’ll need to copy and paste this HTML code directly into each page of your site, just above the </body> tag.
For Online Candidate websites, go to the Site Setup page and add the code into the ‘Custom Code Insertion’ section.
That’s it! If everything is set up correctly, you’ll be able to see traffic statistics in your reports within an hour.
While Google Analytics is simple to install, the program can perform very deep analysis of traffic patterns and success metrics. For the less experienced user, there are two basic questions that require answers.
1) Where do your Visitors come from?
This is one of the most important type of data to provide insights into your visitors. The ‘Traffic Sources’ category displays the websites and keywords which send traffic to your website. This can be broken down further into:
Direct Traffic: The number of visitors who came to the website by entering a URL into their web browser.
Referring Sites: Referring websites are sites which send visitors to your campaign website. The visitors get referenced from the source website and land on the target website using the link provided. Referring websites can be used to judge the success of social media marketing techniques.
Search Engines: This contains a list of the search engines which were used to send traffic to the site.
Keywords: These are the terms that were searched by visitors that led to them clicking through to the website.
2) What are your visitors doing on the Website?
Analysis of this data enables you to track visitors actions on the website. You can find out what pages were looked at, for how long, and whether they were the first or last pages a visitor saw. The Content category in the left sidebar of Google Analytics provides this data:
Top Content: This contains a list of the most popular content as viewed by visitors.
Top Landing Pages: These list the pages visitors first land on. You can examine the browsing path for each webpage to determine traffic patterns and whether they engage the visitors well.
Top Exit Pages: This contains a list of pages which led visitors to exit the website. Pages with a high exit rate should be examined for improvements to keep the visitor on the site or do perform a set task (such as an email signup or donation).
Site Overlay: The Site Overlay opens a new web page which contains a progress bar over every link. These bars shows the percentage of the overall number of page clicks on that link.
Note that in these reports, the ‘Bounce Rate‘ listed is the percentage of visitors that landed on a particular page and immediately left the site. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not finding that particular content engaging.
More advanced uses might want to track how visitors get to a certain page like a volunteer signup form or a donation page. To do that, you will need to create goals and funnels. The Goals category of Google Analytics helps you to set a goal or goal path. By segmenting traffic, you can find out how many visitors completed or did not complete your goals, the overall value of your goals, and what sources of traffic performed best.
For additional information and user tips, visit the Google Analytics blog.
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