I first got involved with Internet retailing when I took a business development position out of business school with CDNow, who at that time was the second largest consumer retailer on the Internet after Amazon. It had recently gone public and was an iconic player in the early Internet retail scene. Through my biz dev dealings for CDNow, I became friends with other folks at leading eTailers...places like eToys and Reel.com. I became aware over time how bad the web-site analytics were at these major public companies, many of them trying to mine crude log files for information, and most of them doing it badly. Eventually great companies like Coremetrics and Omniture came along to address this problem, and created powerful platforms to track, measure and analyze visitor behavior on websites. But their clients have always been major online companies with lots of money to spend, and the small less-sophisticated online business still didn't have any easy and accessible solution for tracking and analyzing what went on on their websites.
Several years ago Google purchased a small web analytics firm named Urchin, and decided to make it free. Yes, free. But not only did they make it available to everybody, and with a staggeringly easy implementation, but the good folks at Google developed resources to make this free tool even better. Of all of Google's various business solutions, Analytics is the one that I have the most experience using (maybe tied with Adwords) and have used for the longest. It is simple and clean-enough for the smallest business owner with a website to use easily, as well as powerful and complex enough for a sophisticated Internet business to use. It is a fantastic tool that can really give you insight into your online business, particularly marketing, search engine optimization, and merchandising.
I'm planning on writing three specific blog pieces on Analytics coming up.
1) How Analytics Helps Your Search Engine Optimization
2) How Analytics Helps Your Marketing Efficiency
3) How Analytics Helps Your Merchandising Optimization (this is related to site design)
And did I mention that this tool is free?
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