I’m often surprised to find that many website owners don’t have an account with Google Analytics to get their free data about the traffic visiting their websites.
It is truly astounding the amount of information that the Google Analytics tool provides — for free. The tracking tool answers questions like the following:
- How many visitors came to your site?
- Are they returning?
- Are they new?
- Which pages are the most popular?
- On which pages they enter your site? (not always the home page)
- On which pages they leave?
- Where in the world they live?
- Which keywords they are typing in search boxes?
- From which websites they linked?
- How long they stayed on your site?
- And so much more.
At first, you can get quite dizzy looking at all the data. You won’t know just what to make of it.
Tracking Your Website’s Traffic with Google Analytics
But as you check your data daily, or even periodically, you will become familiar with how to use this powerful tool. On the day you run a radio or television ad, you will be able to see if you had more traffic to your site. Or the day you ran an email promotion or a direct mail drop. (You are putting your web address on all of your other advertising, right?)
When it comes to tracking results, Internet marketing is far superior to other advertising media.
To access this free tool, go to Google Analytics. It’s easy to sign up. They will give you a piece of code with instructions on how to embed the code on all of your web pages. If you don’t update your website yourself, then have your webmaster set it up. If you have a lot of pages, you can start by simply embedding the code on your most strategic pages.
The following day you will be able to start tracking the traffic on your website.
Easy Web Tip #10: By tracking your website analytics, you will know how well your website is doing its job and where to target improvements.
