Google Analytics a Valuable Tool When Trying to Make Money Online

I joined HubPages about a week ago looking for a way to make money online while doing something I enjoy. The benefit of adding some extra income while writing about topics I am interested in and familiar with was quite appealing. Just like many people who are trying to find supplemental income with make money online opportunities I have been trying to find the best way to achieve success. This page is going to provide some information about a tool called Analytics from Google. You will see some valuable information that can help you in your attempt to make money online.

First of all this tool is free and easy to use. With HubPages for instance you set up the account and enter the code. Analytics does all the hard stuff for you. I am going to point out some statistics that I found by using Analytics that I feel are somewhat valuable.

First is the number of visits: This seems pointless because you can view that on Hubpages. Looking deeper at this allowed me to find that there is more to it than just visits. There are visits, page views, absolutely unique visits, time on page, bounce rate, and new visits. Much more information that just the basic view offered in your hub stats. In this portion of Analytics there is also technical information about the web browsers and operating systems used to view your site. This can be a marketing benefit because you can target add-ons or software programs that are geared specifically for a particular browser and OS. You can even see user connection speeds, beneficial if you are targeting an audience that doesn't have high speed connections, you will know that embedding video may be a pointless effort. There are further breakdowns such as screen resolutions and Java information but I will leave those for you to research more in depth.

Second is traffic sources: This gives you information about where your traffic is coming from, which page they are visiting, and if it is organic or referral. This page breaks everything down into direct traffic, referring sites, and search engine traffic. It also gives percentages for each type of traffic an where that traffic is going. This can be a huge benefit for anyone trying to make money online especially if you are able to narrow your target and increase good traffic while limited the bad. Remember Google places ads that are relevant and also use your traffic performance to figure which ads and how much you are paid from the ad revenue.

Third is the content page: This page breaks down your top content pages and the percentages of total views for each page. Total AdSense page impressions, AdSense unit impressions, and AdSense revenue are also given here. Entrance path, entrance keywords, navigation summary and entrance sources are found here and all give some important data that can be used for your benefit when using AdSense to make money online.

This is a basic overview of how Google Analytics provides valuable information for your campaign to make money online. Here are some stats from my Analytics account. I have received nearly 500 page views in about 1 week, 53% of which are from search engine traffic. I have a total of 814 AdSense unit impressions. About 30% of the traffic to my pages is completely unique with the remaining being return visitors and referral visits from bookmarks. My pages have been viewed from 15 different entrance sources, which means I am being found somewhat easily in places like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

As you can see there is a wealth of information in Google Analytics and if you are trying to make money online with AdSense, Amazon, Ebay, or any other traffic driven methods this can be helpful. The information I covered here doesn't even hit half of the features in this program but it should give you enough to show you the value in such a program. Please feel free to add your comments and tell us