IN THE PREVIOUS article we covered how to advertise, and include advertisements, on your site with Google.

Today we're looking at the lesser-utilised tools that can better establish your site, and make better use of the advertising you're running.

We're using a test-bed site, incorporating all the functionality we've discussed, at UK Cigar Forums.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a comprehensive, and incredibly valuable tool from Google.

Go here to sign up your site to the service, and Google will provide you with a tiny snippet of code you can include in your site.

This will then provide Google with various statistics and information regarding visitors to your site.

The wealth of information you can retrieve from Google Analytics is vast.

You can view basic statistical data concerned with the number of site visits over time, time spent on the site, page views etc.

You can also browse a Flash-based map with the number of visits per region, the browser and OS configuration of your users, and the main pages viewed by visitors by percentage score.

The traffic sources section is a big plus - this lets you know where your visitors are coming from, and where to further refine your advertising. This includes keywords used in Google searches.

Adwords used to advertise your site via Google's Adsense, can be incorporated into Google Analytics.

You can then see the direct return-on-investment and other key metrics for every keyword you have previously purchased via Adwords.

You can also define 'Goals' in Google Analytics. These provide you with a key measure of performance, based on your business-related parameters.

Below you can see a sample report from Google Analytics. Clicking within e ach section provides much more detail on the related subject.

Other Google tools
Google can also provide your entire domain with a plethora of additional services.

These include email (with your domain suffix), calendar, Google Chat, Google Docs, and Google Sites which allows Wiki-like team-collaboration sites.

Primarily, the email service may of use to a new website - you can offload all of the mail duties to Google, through the familiar Gmail interface, without sacrificing your domain name to a standard 'gmail' extension.

Setup is similar to the other applications - simply upload a html file to your website for validation by Google, and then point your domain's MX records to the Google provided ones.

Overall then, anyone starting out on a new web-site will probably find value in at least one of the services provided by Google.

If you're looking to advertise, add advertising to your web site, or simply find out more information on visitors to your site, you can't go too far wrong by using the numerous free tools available from our new Internet overlords. µ