יום שלישי, 16 באוקטובר 2012

Getting started with web stats and A/B Testing with the use of Google analytics tools:

Web stats measure the website traffic and present those figures in a readable form. These statistics are important in determining the future marketing strategy of the website. There are many free and commercial tools available on the internet for getting started with these stats with your website. Google analytics is presently the best, free and easy tool which has all the required features to help a beginner achieve various webstats experiments with his website. Google analytics uses methods like page tagging and JavaScript to store the numbers and traffic details.

How to get started with Google analytics?

You will obviously need a Google account for that. Once it’s done, you login in to the page of Google analytics and add your website. Then you just have to copy a code snippet given out in to the head tag of your website. Google analytics shows the traffic and conversion rates in a very friendly format. It even determines the percentage visits according the Operating system, country of the user and the browser used to access the website. If you are using CMS like Joomla or Wordpress, Analytics plugins are directly available which help you instantly track your web traffic. But if your site is customized html website, then you have to copy the code in every page which you want to track.

What are the things you can do by using Google analytics?

Web stats can be easily obtained by this tool. These figures contain the total number of visitors, unique visitors, time spent on your website, bounce rates, interaction time and a lot more. You can view all this data in a graphical format which can be easily understood. Apart from page tracking, Google analytics now comes included with content experiments tool which contains several web testing tools like Goal Tracking and A/B testing.

Content Experiments is also easy to use and customize. You can easily setup AB Testing for different pages of your website. A/B testing tests two differently designed webpages containing the same information in order to determine the most efficient page which is fetching more traffic and conversion rate. You can divide the traffic in any ratio to both the pages or choose whether to play with only the new traffic or existing traffic. Some of these features were previously present in Google website optimizer. But now, all of them have been integrated under one single platform of Content experiments. In this tool, every function is considered as an experiment performed on your website.

You first have to select the kind of experiment and different options and then copy the given code in to your website. This will start the experiment and you can start tracking results. After obtaining the results, you can modify the variables of your experiment and start once again. By repeatedly performing these tests on your website, you can optimize it for more amount of traffic and conversion rate. It is easy to get started and you can find a number of video tutorials online on how to use these tools.