(EN) Module 5 – Section 5

Analytic tools

Everything is measurable on the web and the instrument of choice for this type of activity is certainly Google Analytics: the powerful tool that Google makes available for monitoring; a suite of analysis of user behaviour that has possible alternatives, but remains a reference point for all those involved in marketing. Google Analytics offers analytic tools both for small businesses and for e-commerce registering thousands of daily users; it can provide simple data, such as the number of sessions for a given period of time, up to extremely complex data.

Google analytics

Exploring the “backstage” of your website, be it an e-commerce, or a site to get in touch with new customers, is the basis for improving your business.

Learning to use Google Analytics is not easy and immediate, but the learning tools that Google makes available are very useful. Among these we highlight the Demo Account, a tool that allows you to learn by making experiments with data from Google Merchandise Store. The Google Analytics demo account is a fully functional Google Analytics account that can be accessed by any Google user. It is a great way to analyse real business data and try out Google Analytics features.

Many of the e-commerce solutions we presented in Module 4 include specific modules for the integrated use of Google Analytics. The image shown is taken from the demo version of Prestashop.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results.

Functionality:

Through Google Search Console you can:

• Submit and check a sitemap, it also helps the webmasters to check if there are any errors with their sitemap.
• Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about when Googlebot accesses a particular site.
• Write and check a robots.txt file to help discover pages that are blocked in robots.txt accidentally.
• List internal and external pages that link to the site.
• Get a list of links which Googlebot had difficulty crawling, including the error that Googlebot received when accessing the URLs in question.
• See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings.
• Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer example.com over www.example.com or vice versa), which determines how the site URL is displayed in SERPs.
• Highlight to Google Search elements of structured data which are used to enrich search hit entries
• Demote Sitelinks for certain search results.
• Receive notifications from Google for manual penalties.
• Provide access to an API to add, change and delete listings and list crawl errors.
• Rich Cards a new section added, for better mobile user experience.
• Check the security issues if there are any with the website – Hacked Site or Malware Attacks)
• Add or remove the property owners and associates of the web property

Discover how Google Search—and the world—sees your site:

• Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
• Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
• Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
• Which sites are linking to your website?
• Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?