If your business has a presence online, you should keep track of the site analytics the same way you would with your brick-and-mortar store locations. Google Analytics is an easy-to-use tool that tracks your website statistics – and the best part is, it’s FREE! It can be implemented into your site by adding a piece of code to your website's HTML.
Once you, or your website developer, set up Google Analytics on your website you can use its reports to compare metrics on a variety of subjects like your unique visitors, referring websites, referring keywords, what content is most popular on your website, etc.
Once you start using Analytics, here are some things to look for:
- Traffic: How many visits do you have each day? Each week? Each month?
- Visitors: Google Analytics offers a variety of information about the visitors to your site. A map overlay makes it easy to see where your visitors are located. You can also view statistics on new vs. repeat visitors, average page views (the number of pages viewed while on the site), and the amount of time visitors spend on your site. Be sure to find out what browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome) your visitors are using to view your site and minimize compatibility issues.
- Traffic Sources: How are online users finding your website? Google Analytics will tell you if they are being driven to your site by linking from another website, by directly typing your URL into a browser, or searching on a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo!). If they are searching on a search engine, Analytics will also tell you what search terms are being used to find your site (most often if will be the name of your business or location, but you may find some information that will surprise you).
- Content: Find out what the most (and least) popular pages are within your website and which pages are most often used for entry to and exit from the site. Drill down to find more specific information on individual pages, such as the path used to end up at the page and the bounce rate from the page.
- Site Overlay: Turn on the Site Overlay feature and view your live website with the percentage (and number) of clicks overlaid on each link.
- Advanced Tools: If you are looking at the same data on a regular basis, create custom reports and save them to your account. You can also set up your account to send you automatic emails with your website statistics.
- E-Commerce: Setting up the e-commerce reporting in Google Analytics requires a little more technical knowledge, but it can be very helpful to calculate sales metrics such as conversion and average transaction. You can also set up Google Ad conversions and track goals if you use Google pay-per-click Ads.
Take The Tip:
Learn more by visiting the Google Analytics homepage and “Help” page.
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