Using Google Analytics

Why use google analytics? This tool will help you to understand your current and potential customers. It will help you to know what is working and not working on your website. It will help you turn your website from an expense to an asset.

If I were to hire a new employee then never check on his progress, never track his work, never even talk to him how much benefit would he be to my company. It seems ridiculous that anyone would hire a new employee and then never think about them again. I see that happen so often with websites. Everyone knows they need some kind of web presence for their business. So they hire a web developer or design firm to create a website for them. They will pay thousands of dollars to get a great looking site. They will spend hours getting content and pictures. Then the site is launched and they will never look at it again. A website should be just like an employee to a company. It should make the business money. How can you find out if your website is an asset or expense. This is where Google Analytics comes in, it can give you enough information to really know if your website is working like it should. Google Analytics is free (we use it on many of our sites). In another post I will go into more detail about how Analytics works and how to use it. For now we will just look at the benefits. It will tell you how many new people hit your site each day, where they came from, and how long they stayed. It does this using some very user friendly graphs and text.

For Example Here is a look at where the websites visitors are coming from

The data is very easy to understand once you get used to google vocabulary. With Analytics you can start to find what pages interest people. The data will tell you how long visitors spend on your site and even on each page. It will tell you what pages they 'bounce' (leave your site).

If you have an e-commerce site you can even track product purchases. Get to know analytics. Think of it as your Human Resources director for your website.