Introduction

Building nice looking websites is great; building websites that have a high Return Of Investment is priceless.

Recently I joined the web team of a Brussels based communication agency, a team with expert knowledge in the fields of user experience design, content strategies, software development, and interaction design. We spend a lot of time on wireframes, storyboards, and prototypes, which guarantees that the functionality and the content of the websites are optimal before any graphical design takes place. This means our websites have a solid base to be built upon, which results in a higher ROI with less time spent on development.

A huge part of our work is under the hood: Google Analytics inside Flash.

This tool allows us to measure how well our sites are doing against our predefined goals: bounce rate, click paths and even custom measurements like how many people scrolled a certain page. Our specialists analyze all this information and use it to optimize the website. If you’re not measuring how people are using your site, you can only guess about its successes and failures.

The following setup is a stripped-down version of an image gallery; Google Analytics allowed the client to discover which images triggered the most interest. I’ve left out the actual gallery building as it is beyond the scope of this tutorial; there are plenty on Activetuts+ already though – just search for “gallery”.

We will focus on how to set up Google Analytics to put a smile on your clients’ faces (and probably yours too…)