Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most widely used web analytics application. Emerged from and based upon the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was bought by Google in April 2005), the tool has become publicly available for free under the new flagship of Google Analytics. In May 2007 the application was heavily edited, developed and released; the design was simplified and more advanced featured were added. Over years Google Analytics managed to gain on popularity because of its simplicity and many advanced features for curious site owners and professional marketers.

You probably use Google Analytics on a regular basis, for basic stats tracking the performance of your site. And, just like most GA users, you probably very rarely venture far from the comfort of the reports shown on the dashboard. That’s all the analytical information you need, you may be thinking … or is it?

Did you know that Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports that will help you analyze all possible data about your website traffic. It not only tracks visitors to your site or the number of page views, it can be used to see which content gets the most visits, time on site per visit, which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, Adsense and emails and much, much more.

This post is not a be-all-and-end-all look at GA, but a rough guide to its many under-used features and reports. It is an easy to read guide that will help you understand and use the full power of Google Analytics. Honestly, it’s not that daunting.

By Paul Andrew

How many times have you seen totally irrelevant ads appearing on your page, for which your readers have no interest. You are losing valuable clicks here because one your visitors might get confused and leave your site, second he might not even come back later. To avoid such disasters you need to ensure that the ads that appear on your website is relevant to the content that is on the site.

The ads are served on your site based upon the following parameters:
1. URL of the site
2. Title text of the site
3. Text of links
4. Text of links that link to your site (appearing on other sites)
5. Content of links that point to external pages
6. Keywords appearing frequently on the site
7. Search Engine queries that lead to the page etc...

The above broad parameters need to be kept in mind while driving Adsense Ad Units to your site. While you might be able to control the text of your articles/post on the blogs but the text of comments made by your visitors is not in your hands and they can be totally in tangent with the content of the post/page. To overcome this very important problem section targeting needs to be used for effective ad serving. This is done by enclosing the relevant content in HTML tags;

This will ensure that the adsense crawler will only read the content enclosed within these tags and ignore (for the purpose of Ad Serving) other text on the page.

Image via Wikipedia

Another great way to generate a traffic surge is to use this free service from Yahoo. This involves people asking questions about various fields and then experts in those fields answering them. Fairly simple isn't it? But it presents a unique opportunity to get free traffic to your website/blog.

The process is very straight-forward. You need to have a yahoo account and then you choose a category of your choice where you think you are an expert or at least for which you can answer questions from newbies or other people looking for answers. There are many categories to choose from and you will definitely find a category that suits you.

After this you should wait to get questions from the other users of the service and prepare to give solutions to their problems. While answering give logical answers to the queries and try and satisfy the person. The thing you need to do here is to add a link to your website/blog in this answer and lo behold you have a free link to your site from Yahoo Answers. Now the trick here is to be the early bird and answer a question before other experts answer it. This gives you more exposure and increases your reputation.

I hope you all have installed Google Analytics in your blog. If not then quickly do so. The information and means to do it are available here. If you do not already know then you should know that Google Analytics is a tool that provides vital statistics about your website like how many people are visiting it and what time do they spend there etc. As you see above the Google Analytics gives information such as Visits, Page Views, Bounce Rates, Average time spent on the website, new visitors etc.

The most important parameter given above is the Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of people who come to the website and go back without going to any other page on the website. The higher this number the greater number of customers you are losing everyday. The endeavor on the webmaster's part should be to reduce this to bare minimum. In fact the ideal bounce rate should be 0. Any number more than zero is totally unacceptable.

To reduce the bounce rate the following steps must be taken immediately.