Product Review: Google Analytics, a must for your fashion website

Product Review: As an online marketing professional, I have had the opportunity to use various software products to track the traffic on my site. Some were cheap and basic, other were expensive and quite complicated. Now, the second incarnation of Google's web tracking tool, called Google Analytics, bring the best of both worlds: it is cheap (actually, it is free) and you create very detailed reports with it.

Quite frankly, I do not see why I would use any other. I was a bit reluctant at first to put yet another part of my online activities into Google's hands. They already do most of my searches, my e-mail, and my ads; do they need to know about my traffic as well?

I gave the tool a try and was soon convinced that the trade-off was well worth it. If you do not need sophisticated data reports aimed at your team of statiticians, then you may find that you like Google Analytics just as much as me.

The tool is simple to use. There is nothing revolutionary in the way it works, but to me, that is the beauty of it: it has the best features in its compiling tools, presented in a simple manner, and it’s free.

You can do the usual: see how many visitors hit your site, where they came from (site referrals, keywords typed in search engines, etc.), see which landing pages were the most popular, etc.   However, you can also view a comparison between 2 periods of time in a snap.

Google has smartly integrated Google Analytics with its sponsored links program, Google AdWords. It means that within Google Analytics, you can create reports reflecting the money you spent to attract visitors through paid advertising and measure the return that you got in visits or measure how many new visitors subscribed to your newsletter.
 
So, while I use this tool, I also recommend it. It is so good that, in some ways, I regret that it belongs to Google, as this brand is becoming more and more invasive. On the flip side, by belonging to Google, it benefits from the best engineers and the tight integration with other popular Google applications.

Oh, and did I say that it was free?