This is a more of a powerful tool than many publishers realize. These reports can tell exactly where your traffic is coming from.
I used to be a fan of Statcounter but I have come to find the Google Analytics reports are more a lot better. First they tell you exactly what terms people are using to find your website. Second, they tell you where part of a country or world these visitors are from. Third, they give all sorts of valuable percentages that you can use to successfully get the entire picture of how people are coming to your website.
This tool is very valuable and very necessary for publishers.
What I have found particularly helpful about Google Analytics is how it helps me target long tail traffic. You will find that though you may be going after specific keywords about half your traffic will come from long tail phrases having to do with those keywords.
Take this website for instance. I am clearly targeting “adsense revenue” and “Google adsense revenue.” If I were to write an article, do a link exchange, or participate in any sort of active link building I would try to incorporate those keywords in the anchor text.
And currently I do rank decently for those terms. Not where I would want to be but I am on page one. But when I look at my Google analytics I see that most of my traffic is not coming from those keywords. Its actually very minute. I am getting anywhere from 40-80 people come to this website everyday and about 70% of that traffic is from long tail variations of those two keywords. More people are coming from my guest posts I have written then people looking up those two terms I just mentioned.
Quite frankly the numbers from the Google keyword tool are dead wrong. I have found them to be wildly inaccurate though they can tell you how much traffic a keyword has relative to another and which keywords are totally not worth going after.
Good think this particular blog of mine is content rich. That is why natural writers with at least a basic knowledge of SEO will do well from an internet marketing standpoint. I cannot tell you how much of my adsense revenue is based off of longtail traffic that is just coming from the content I have written but not necessarily optimized for.
The only way to know that is to have Google Analytics installed. If you do not then you are putting yourself at a tremendous disadvantage. Its free and takes less than ten minutes to set up. The most annoying part is validating your site though they have made it easier than before.
