Google

Over View

In the beginning, Google was nothing more than a research project developed by two Stanford graduate students. In 1996, Sergey Brin and Larry Page had developed a search engine with a unique method of ranking search results. As the need for a relevant search engine on the internet became clearer and clearer, Brin and Page registered the Google.com domain in 1997 and officially formed Google, Inc. on September 7, 1998. Google had an advantage over other search engines at the time because their search results were ranked in a relevant manner; based on the number of sites linking to each specific page. Because of the high quality search results and their simple approach to searching, Google's popularity has grown substantially over time. Along with their growth in popularity, Google has grown to employ more than 10,000 people worldwide, while also being ranked as the best company to work for by Fortune Magazine (Susan, 2009, p. 80).

The term 'google' was derived from a misspelling of the word 'googol,' which refers to 10100, and the name stuck. Also, due to the popularity of the world 'google,' Merriam-Webster added the term to their dictionary defining google as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.” As 'googling' things became more commonplace, Google's revenues grew tremendously through the use of advertisements. Although Google's advertising revenues have risen every year in the past five years, Google went public on August 19, 2004, offering 19,605,052 shares at $85 per share. Since then, Google's stock price has ascended to more than $500 in early 2007. While Google's initial market capitalization was roughly $1.7 billion, that figure has ballooned to more than $157 billion in subsequent years. In addition, Google has made many acquisitions to allow for continued innovation.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that will give detailed statistics about visitors to a website. Google Analytics has the ability to track visitors from all referrers, such as search engines, display advertising, pay-per click, email and links with in documents such as PDF. Google Analytics uses a dashboard type data view to display high level data for the casual user or as I like to call them “Management”. But Google Analytics also provides more in-depth data report. With the use of Google Analytics pages that are performing poorly can be identified and as well as pages that are the “Most hit”. Google Analytics can also tell where your visitors are coming from, and how long they are staying on the site. Google Analytics can also track and return results for mobile websites, mobile apps and web enabled mobile phones. This includes high-end phones such as iPhone or Android to non-JavaScript enabled devices (Tzemah, 2012).

Google Analytics can also be used for ecommerce reporting. Google Analytics can track sales goals and transactions, if integrated with AdWords you can track data on keywords, search queries and much more. If integrated with AdSense, you can get reports on site content that is generating ...