Website Analytics Overview
You need analytics, period. Having website analytics installed on your website can give you access to some extremely valuable information that will help you make decisions about advertising and promotion for your website. Still, the whole website analytics process can be quite confusing. It's important to know how to get a proper analytics system installed and what you should be looking out for.
Website analytics defined
Simply put, website analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of information concerning people who use your website. A proper analytics platform will tell you how many visits there have been, where they've come from and what words people are searching for before they find you. There's a load more information available, but those are the biggies.
Why do website analytics matter?
Your website is the front door to the information you are providing about either yourself or your organisation. Website analytics can tell you how many people are coming in that door as well as where they're from and how they got there.
Let me give you an example. Let's say you are wanting to sell your dog's fur because you are convinced it has magical power. You set up magicalfur.com and you wait for the cash to roll in. To help the process, you decide to post on a few magic blogs as well as a few blogs about dogs. Using analytics, you would then be able to tell how many visits you were getting from those blog postings. Say the posting on the dog blog (that's fun to say outloud) was getting you 50 visits a day and the magic blog was getting you about 5. Assuming both blogs have the same amount of visitors (you can determine this by a simple page ranking search), you'd know that it's far better for you to target dog blogs rather than magic ones.
Yeah I know, that's a fairly basic example. Hopefully you get the point though. Analytics give you information that helps you decide where your enegy is best spent. The best analytics systems will graph the data in a way that is easy to understand. You'll see if your website is more popular on a Friday than it is on a Monday. If you're spending money advertising your site, you'll then know that you'd be better to spend more money during the second half of the week than you do at the beginning because that's when people are more likely to visit your website anyway.
Okay, so what's the best website analytics system?
It depends who you ask, but because you are reading this page and it's on my website, I'll tell you with full confidence that Google Analytics is the best system out there. So long as you don't want to track more than 25 websites, it's free.
Installing Google Analytics is easy. You first need to sign up for a Google Analytics account and then install the tracking code on each page you want to track. I track every page for my clients to ensure we know exactly what pages are performing well and which ones are underperforming. I'm then able to tweak frontpage content to ensure that all of my client's priority areas are being visited.
One tip - if you regularly visit your own website you may want to filter out your own visits so that the analytics data isn't thrown off. For example, if you only get 20 visits/day but you are 10 of them, your analytics system should probably know that. I'll post a seperate article soon about analytics filtering.
