Yes our patience has been rewarded and we are now successfully established with Google Analytics as our website visitor tracking solution.
It is always a bit of a wrench when you change analysis packages. Most of the data is the same but the way it is presented is always a bit different. With Analytics we gain a strong Goals focus but loose a lot of detail compared with Hitslink. The navigation analysis is much more responsive and it will take a little time to get accustomed to that.
The first impressions are that Google pay much more attention to the duration of visits and what they refer to as 'bounce' i.e. very short duration visits. I speculated in an earlier article that they may find that useful data when analyzing the success of searches. At first blush apart from the problems we identified some time ago with our iTunes page there seems to be an issue with a few of the composer pages where visitors don't seem to be stopping for long.
So the next task is to formulate our website goals in Analytics format. Some are pretty straight forward and others may need some work to make them measurable - time for more experiments.
One of the other observations is that rather few of our blog readers visit the rest of the site so we have added a more obvious link on the side bar - why not give it a try?
It is always a bit of a wrench when you change analysis packages. Most of the data is the same but the way it is presented is always a bit different. With Analytics we gain a strong Goals focus but loose a lot of detail compared with Hitslink. The navigation analysis is much more responsive and it will take a little time to get accustomed to that.
The first impressions are that Google pay much more attention to the duration of visits and what they refer to as 'bounce' i.e. very short duration visits. I speculated in an earlier article that they may find that useful data when analyzing the success of searches. At first blush apart from the problems we identified some time ago with our iTunes page there seems to be an issue with a few of the composer pages where visitors don't seem to be stopping for long.
So the next task is to formulate our website goals in Analytics format. Some are pretty straight forward and others may need some work to make them measurable - time for more experiments.
One of the other observations is that rather few of our blog readers visit the rest of the site so we have added a more obvious link on the side bar - why not give it a try?