We asked Dyana Najdi, Google’s Analytics Manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for some from-the-horse’s-mouth insights into website analytics, Google-style.

So, what exactly is web analytics, and why is it so important?

The definition has evolved over the years. Traditionally it was very much targeted at the website developer or IT department, and we saw terms such as ‘collection, analysis and reporting of internet data’ and ‘web usage optimisation’.

Put simply, this is now defined as ‘the study of online behaviour in order to improve it’.  A website operating without analytics has limited or no visibility on its performance, possibly making decisions on a whim rather than user-analysis. With analytics, websites can see the effectiveness of their marketing activities, analyse visitors’ collective activity on their site, identify their pain-points, and measure the effectiveness of attempts to improve these.

Can you give us some examples of how website owners use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has an increasingly growing suite of reporting features aimed at servicing the needs of everyone from the smallest sites to large enterprise clients.

Some examples include campaign tracking for measuring the performance of marketing campaigns and understanding which keywords, affiliates, newsletters etc are performing best. By determining which sources are driving the most qualified traffic to a site, campaigns can be optimised to maximise these.

Accompanying this is the ability to measure what groups of visitors do on a site and whether the site has been successful in driving them towards completing predefined site objectives (such as making a purchase, or registering for a newsletter). Here website owners can set up goals to capture conversion rates and understand how successful their conversion process has been. For those who also want to identify missed opportunities, funnel path analysis may be used to identify where people are dropping out of a conversion process and determine why.

One of my preferred reports is Internal Site Search. This is great because whereas most reports focus on what people did on a site, this shows what people wanted to do (and may possible not have been able to). Content and navigation can be optimised by understanding what visitors were looking for, as well as identifying possible keywords to buy for paid advertising.

These are just a few examples, you can view some case studies on the Google Analytics site.

So what’s in it for Google?

We believe in transparency and want to give advertisers of any size the ability to measure the performance of their advertising campaigns. Instead of having to invest heavily in our reporting solution, we would rather that customers invest in gaining insights from these tools by hiring skilled data analysts and/or investing in training and education. Google benefits because we have better informed, savvy advertisers who are able to optimise their online presence and spend more effectively.

There must be some hidden gems - can you talk us through some of the features of Google Analytics with which users might be less familiar?

We recently announced a bundle of new features for Google Analytics.

- Advanced Segmentation which allows you to create on-the-fly subsets of traffic for current and historical data. Segments can be defined and applied to reports instead of having to create separate profiles and applying filters. These can be saved and applied to any report, or even compared against one another.

- Custom Reports allow users to create customised report views showing only information which is relevant to them. Reports can be personalised by comparing any available dimension and metric to create a report that is organised in a way which is relevant to the user’s industry or business.

- Motion Charts allow visual, multi-dimensional analysis of metrics over time. Users can plot their data across five dimensions; x & y chart axes, bubble size and colour, and time. Insights can be uncovered that may have been difficult to discover using traditional two-dimensional charts.  By allowing users to select the metric for each dimension, they are given a new flexibility to investigate the combinations of metrics most relevant to their particular website.

- Google Analytics API (currently in private beta) allows users to create software programs and applications using read-only report level data from Google Analytics. The data exported can be used in any number of ways, such as building custom dashboards, creating data visualizations or interfaces, performing offline analysis, combining Analytics data with other data sources, among others.

- Event tracking for reporting on visitor interactions with flash movies, gadgets, downloads, and other user interaction with website elements that do not generate traditional pageviews

More information can be found on the Google Analytics Blog.

What other solutions does Google offer to website owners?

Most prominent is our seamless integration with AdWords which provides advertisers with the ability to measure the performance and ROI of AdWords campaigns.

Keyword autotagging means that advertisers can see their Google Analytics reports automatically populated with click, cost and other data for purchased keywords without having to manually modify their campaign URLs.

Cost data can also be automatically applied, allowing analytics to import click and spend data directly from AdWords to be viewed among other data in the Google Analytics interface.

Users are then able to measure the performance of each campaign and compare this against other traffic source segments on the website.

AdWords advertisers can easily link Google Analytics to AdWords by clicking on the ‘Analytics’ tab within their AdWords account. They can then enjoy additional AdWords return on investment reporting.

Another recently announced feature is the ability to integrate AdSense and Google Analytics, this feature is currently in private beta. This integration provides publishers with a more robust way to view their AdSense performance. In the US we also support TV and radio ad reporting.

Google Analytics is also the only reporting tool to offer an industry benchmarking feature, showing how a website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals for organisations of a similar size.

Can you give us an indication of what is planned for future releases?

Unfortunately we can’t disclose information regarding future releases, however I can tell you that we are constantly evolving the tool. Our teams liaise closely with customers to understand what features and functionality they need which may be lacking, and we prioritise development efforts around these to ensure Google Analytics is as powerful, flexible, and useful as a web analytics tool can be.

Further Information

You can get up to £75 Google AdWords vouchers and Google Analytics Automation free with selected Daily.co.uk Web Hosting and eShop accounts.

More about Google Analytics.