Google™ Analytics 2.0

Chapter 20. Additional Traffic Reports

Traffic, or visitors, to your web site is the most important element of the site. Sure, you can have great content. Or smooth transaction capabilities. You can even have the easiest site on the web to use. But if visitors don’t come to your site, none of that means anything.

One way to draw people to your site is by using advertising campaigns. The most common way that many web site owners draw traffic is AdWords campaigns. But that’s not the only way. Other advertising methods on the Internet can also be used to draw visitors, and you’ll want to be able to track those ways.

The last two reports in the section — Campaigns and Ad Versions — help you track your AdWords and other types of advertising and marketing campaigns. These reports show you how well (or how poorly) your ads are performing. Unfortunately, they won’t tell you how to fix that, but they could point you in the right direction.

Campaigns

Tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is just half the battle. The other half is understanding how the campaign affects the number of people who reach a defined goal on your web site. This is called goal conversion. And marketing is all about conversions.

The goal could be for a visitor to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or even just link to the page. Whatever your desired marketing campaign results are, the number of conversions can be looked at in a variety of ways, and each conversion view tells you something more about ...