Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that is designed to generate some really detailed statistics regarding the visitors who are coming to a website. The purpose behind Google Analytics is to meet the needs of marketers that want to know more about who is visiting a website, how, from where and why. Google Analytics is currently the most widely of all used services offering website statistics.
Google Analytics is capable of tracking visitors from every different referrer, including display advertising, search engines, pay per click networks, digital collateral and e-mail marketing. An example of digital collateral is when links are inserted into PDF documents.
One of the greatest benefits behind the Google Analytics web application is the fact that you can integrate it with your AdWords campaigns. This will allow you to review your online campaigns, tracking a wide variety of different parameters including page quality and conversion rates. You can set measureable goals such as sales, lead generation, viewing specific page goals and downloading file goals and this will tell you how well your campaigns are performing. You can also monetize these goals. By making use of Google Analytics, as a marketer you will be able to determine which ones of your ads are actually performing, which ones are not. This is going to provide the information that you need to cull or optimize your campaigns accordingly.
The main approach when using Google Analytics is to see high-level data in a dashboard layout when you are a casual user, and then to find more in-depth information further in the reports generated by the web application. Through using Google Analytics you will be able to analyze poorly performing websites so that you can optimize them further. There are a myriad of other advanced features that the Google Analytics web application offers, including custom segmentation of visitors for example. You can have up to 50 different site profiles in a single account.