Recently Google announced in their Google Analytics blog that they have launched Google Analytics API (Application Programming Interface).

Now what is this?

First definition of Application Programming Interface: API is a set of functions or programs that can be called from an application program to access features of another program.

For example… Google Maps API is an application programming interface that lets webmasters embed Google Maps in any web page with the use of JavaScript.

Please don’t confuse it with Google Maps itself. It is an API of Google Maps and Not the full software that Google Maps uses. This API just lets a webpage CONNECT to Google Maps displaying the exact image users would see by going to the home page of Google Maps.

How can Google Analytics API help you?

According to the Google Analytics blog:

The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

Let’s take a few examples.

Google Analytics for Android will help you to install Google API in the Android phone thus letting you access your analytics data wherever you go. Of course you should have your mobile phone with you.

Currently it costs $3, but imagine the use if you have a website with thousands of visitors coming everyday and you need to constantly monitor visitor behavior to run your business properly. You can’t be always in front of your computer. Can you?

Polaris is a Google Analytics desktop widget that will help you to integrate the API to help you see your analytics data right from your desktop. No need to visit Google Analytics page. Just double click the application and see your data anytime.

MailChimp’s Analytics 360 will let you integrate the API in your email campaigns and will help you to know:

ROI for the campaign
Revenue created
Average value per visitor
Goals completed
Conversion rate
eCommerce transactions

And you know what – it’s absolutely free!

You can see here  how many companies are already using the Google Analytics API to their advantage.

For further information please visit the Google Analytics blog post.

Are you using Google Analytics API? Are you finding it useful?

Once your website is up and running, you need to track its performance and have an insight into the behavior of your visitors. You might be wondering what purpose is served by web analytics and web tracking? Well, unless you have these data to analyze, you won’t know where your business is heading to and will be unable to take effective business decisions. 

Website analytics and website tracking will help you to know:

• Number of visitors to your site and their respective countries
• Time spent on your site
• The top landing pages
• The top exit pages
• Keywords used by your visitors
• Referral sites from where they have arrived at your web page
• Their browsing paths through your site
• Number of new / returning visitors
• The browsers used by them
• The preferences shown by your visitors

As the ultimate aim of almost every business is to get an enviable ROI (Return on Investment), knowing the preferences of your visitors will help you to plan your online strategies in addition to finalizing the sales and marketing proposals.

The data provided by the website analytics will also help you to fine-tune your site. If you find that visitors are leaving from some particular web pages, you may compare them with the top landing pages of your site and try to figure out what went wrong. Once you get the reason, fix the problem. Knowing the geographical location of your visitors may help in geo-targeting. Keywords that these people have used to find your site will be useful in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you find that many people are landing at your “portfolio” or “price-quote” page but none or very few are going to the “place your order” section, check the internal navigation and ensure that there’s no problem while submitting the order form.

These and some other information will surely help your online business. That’s the reason why you should say yes to web tracking and web analytics.

If budget is a problem Google Analytics is a FREE and great Website analytics tool, and is enough for a small business company that wants to track and improve its ROI.

Remember that NOT tracking your website’s visitor behavior means not knowing how to make more sales or not knowing why there were a lot of sales or no sales at all.

Web analytics is like a doctor examining his patient. Like a proper medicine can improve health, a proper analytics and decision can tremendously improve your return on investment on your online business.

It’s official. Google Analytics will now show data of Google AdSense.

Here is the link to the official announcement in the Google AdSense Blog.

This is good news and will benefit all AdSense publishers. It was long anticipated as was reported many times in blogs and portals.

The AdSense report is under Content section of Google Analytics.

Once you are there you will be able to see interesting graphical representation of your adsense performance.

The adsense overview will show 10 important statistics

• total revenue,
• revenue made for 1000 visitors,
• total ads clicked,
• number of ads clicked per 100 visits,
• adsense click though rate (CTR),
• eCPM – estimated cost per 1000 page impressions,
• total times the ads were displayed,
• ad impressions per visitor,
• total pageviews, and
• pageviews per visitor.

Theres more.

You can know the referrals that are bringing you more dollars. With this information you can focus on getting more traffic from these referrals.

In addition to these you can know visitors from which cities are making more money for you, which hours of the day are the best performing hours, content/pages that are performing well or pages that aren’t performing well.

Knowing the countries that are sending you few visitors will also help. You can concentrate on writing content made especially for these countries.

There are more goodies to it than I can actually write. With the help of these matrices you can now take informed decisions, test well and make more money out of your adsense account.

Right now this feature is not available all publishers, but gradually everyone will be invited.

I am excited like you guys and looking forward for the invitation.

Are you invited?

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1. Make a date with data in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great and free web-analytics software to know how and how many visitors are coming to a website. Well it has many other features too. For more information visit Google Analytics Features page.

Analytics helps to know the keywords that a website visitor typed in the search engines to get to a site. These keywords can be a great resource to know how to get more traffic from the search engines, especially the long tail keywords.

If you are using Google Analytics, you can view the keywords by Login >> Traffic Sources >> Keywords.

What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are the keywords that contain three or more than three words. There are exceptions though. For example the keyword “search engine optimization” is NOT a long tail keyword because it is a very popular term. But if the user types “search engine optimization marketing” then it is a long tail keyword.

Long tail keywords differ from industry to industry. Analytics helps to know the long tails because usually these are not very popular terms.

How to research long tail keywords to get better and more visitors?

Long tail keywords account for more than 65% of visitors to a site. In some cases its even more. This shows the importance of long tail keywords. They are a gold mine. Dig more and you get more!

Long tail keywords tell there own story. Study them carefully. If you sell multiple products, you will notice that most visitors coming through long tail keywords are looking for more information on only one or two of your products or service.

What do you understand? It means your site is not properly optimized for the rest of the products.

Now that you know that which are the products that are not properly optimized for the search engines you can take the following steps:

1. Research why these pages are not optimized. Write good content for these products. Get more inbound links with relevant anchor text to these pages. Do whatever to get these pages up in the ranking.

Or,

2. Concentrate more on the current products that are already optimized for the search engines. Write more content, get inbound links to these pages etc.

How to take this decision? Well it is complex to answer this. Whenever we do business our sole motto is to make more money out of the business.

If the products that are properly optimized are giving you a good return on investment, go for them, else try optimizing the pages for other products.

Long tail keyword also helps in creating cheap pay per click campaigns. Use Google keyword tool to research popular keywords using the long tail keywords. Set up a PPC campaign for these keywords to get more traffic.

You can even create more webpages optimized especially for these popular long tail keywords.

I hope these ideas will help you to get more traffic for your site. You views are important for growth of this blog. Please leave a comment and let me know what you would like to read in this blog.

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