Google tools for your website

Where do you go to if you need to find anything on the web? A search engine. And what search engine is that? If you’re like most people, you’d answer Google. This is not to say that there are no other search engines out there (there are, and excellent ones at that), but Google seems to be the most popular, so much so that it has become part of our lexicon. Who hasn’t heard of the phrase “google it” to refer to looking something up on the web?

However, it is not only in web search that Google excels. It also offers a plethora of online tools, many of them free, to help website owners promote and build better sites. This article aims to introduce the reader to three of these online tools.

Google Analytics, as the name suggests, is a free, online web analytics tool that tells you how your visitors found out about your site, and how their experience with your site was, e.g. what pages were accessed before a purchase was made, from what page they surfed out of your site, how many visitors were from a given geographical region (at least in the United States), etc. It does the analytics through Javascript code, included in the site’s pages, that tells Google Analytics servers when a page is accessed over a browser. Website owners can make decisions on what pages need improvement and what pages they need to highlight using the results of the analysis, which are presented graphically for better readability. Because it’s free, even small business owners and individuals can use it to track expressions and clickthroughs for their sites.

Google Adwords is another online service that allows you to post ads on Google search result pages and your website. You create your own ads, select keywords based on your site’s contents, and the products and/or services you offer, then watch how effective your ads are by tracking the number of clickthroughs and purchases made from these ads, which are displayed on Google’s search result pages based on your keywords. You pay only a minimal amount each time your ad gets clicked. This tool integrates with Analytics to tell you if your Adwords lead to a better experience for users on your site.

Google Website Optimizer, still in beta, is another free tool that allows you to conduct multivariate testing on your website. Multivariate testing is the term used for testing a web page based on the mix of content (text, graphics, etc.) that can be found on that page, allowing identification of which mix is optimal. With Google Website Optimizer, this task is easy as it allows you to input page variations, identify the goal of the page for your users, e.g. make a purchase, and tell if the page does indeed result in the attainment of that goal, e.g. make more purchases. It does the tracking through HTML code entered on the page.

All three tools come with complete documentation, even demos, and website owners will find them a breeze to use after the initial familiarization.

The above are just some of the tools you can use to help improve your website. There are, I’m sure, still many out there.

You might also be interested in the Google Pack:

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