Google Analytics Shows How Customers
Travel Your Site
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/231901209?queryText=%22google+analytics%22
On
October 19, 2001 during the Web 2.0 Summit, Google launched a new version of
Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free
application offered by Google to help manage what people do on your web site.
The problem was that its show very little detail on if a user was stuck or had
trouble navigating your web site. To help show Google Analytics users what was
going on when people navigated their site they looked “back to the 19th century
and historian Charles Minard's famous visualization of Napoleon's 1812 campaign
into Russia and the losses incurred along the way, Wojcicki said. In one image,
Minard was able to show geography, time, and troop strength, particularly
dramatizing the attrition from desertion and death on the way to Moscow and on
the retreat back to France.” The problem with Minard visualization was
that it show only how many people died and where it didn’t show how many people
with horse died, or how many survived that could speak Russian. The visualization
just showed a basic overview of what happened. In the same way Google Analytics
did the same thing. Just showed a basic overview what was happening once a user
entered the web site. But in the last quarter of 2011 Google updated this and
added new features that showed it user not only what was happening once people
visited their site but where and when they logged on. This is a great idea and
great advancement in the way owners of companies and their web site view
things. So owners can see where there is a problem and try to fix it. Owners
save money with this new Google Analytics version, because Google Analytics
lets them see exactly where there is a problem, so they are not fixing
something that works properly and waste time and money. This is great in so
many ways, but to be honest, to record this data and analysis it, you are going
to need a pretty good mainframe. That is a lot of data to store and translate so
that the IT personal can use and make sense of it.
I agree with what you had to say regarding Google Analytics being extremely helpful for Google as a company. I found it really interesting that Google just started using this to help them learn about their user base. I think this will be helpful to them like you said, because they will know if their users are having problems accessing or using their website. If there is a major problem that is occurring often managers will be able to quickly respond to the problem and continue to make Google an extremely useful website. I believe that more and more companies should develop a program like this for their website, I think they would find it extremely helpful and more and more people would enjoy using their website.
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