Google Analytics-Relevance

Monday, October 6, 2008

AdWords has been deliberated upon in an earlier chapter, so read-
ers are aware of the practice of “buying keywords.” Briefly, it
means that advertisers pay an ad service provider like Google to
display their ad every time someone searches for the keyword on
their search engine; or someone visits a site containing a high
recurrence of the keyword. Since GA doesn’t only track keywords
associated in the AdWords programme, but also those from other
programs, and even other marketing efforts like affiliate market-
ing, e-mail newsletters, banner ads, etc. a broad perspective of
online ad effectiveness can be arrived at.
For a marketer, knowing which keyword is bringing in most
traffic would enable reducing spending on buying other key-
words. For example, say a travel site buys “airplane” and “holiday.”
If the GA report shows that 90 per cent of those coming to the site
are contributed by ads based on “holiday,” the company can stop
investing in the “airplane” keyword.
For the webmaster, information about the browsing environ-
ment will allow modifying the site to suit the majority of cus-
tomers. For example, if reports suggest that only 5 per cent of vis-
itors are using Flash-enabled browsers, the webmaster can
decrease Flash content to allow the majority of the users to expe-
rience to the fullest what the site has to offer. (Just by the way, all
charts in GA are Flash-based.)
For the Executive, nothing is as important as knowing where
all the advertising budget is being utilised and whether it is gen-
erating returns. With reports that track Return on Investment on
different types of marketing campaigns, GA can allow the execu-
tive to decide the proportion of the budget allocation across all
marketing efforts