Everyday I check the statistics for each of my sites. I look at the number of visits, what pages people are looking at, how they arrived at my site, where they went on my site, how long they were there for etc. etc.

Knowing how your website is performing is crucial for any online marketing or SEO campaign, but a lot of small businesses who approach us have no idea about statistics or analytics. If you don’t monitor your website’s performance you might as well throw your online marketing budget out the window because you’re wasting your time and missing-out on countless potential sales!

So how does one monitor their websites performance?

There are literally thousands of different log file analyzers, tracking tools and analytics programs available. Most web hosting packages should come with a free statistics feature or if you’re really interested in a detailed look at some of the better corporate solutions I’d recommend reading: 2007 Web Analytics Shootout - Final Report.

If you’re limited by budget, your web host doesn’t provide any stats or your new to how all this works, I’d recommend trying Google Analytics.

To help get you started, Google have kindly provided 11 analytics video tutorials on YouTube. In total, these span about 4 hours of viewing. If you don’t have that much time, here’s what the Official Google Analytics Blog recommends:

Those of you who want to pick up a few quick tips might be interested in ‘Bounce Rate: The Simply Powerful Metric‘, ‘Non Ecommerce Sites: Beyond Averages…‘, and ‘Context and Actionability in Web Analytics‘ by Avinash Kaushik, our resident Analytics Evangelist, blogger, and author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. We also have the complete sessions, including an introduction to Conversion University by Brett Crosby, Sr. Manager, which provides perspective on the evolution and direction of Google Analytics. Stephanie Hsu covers key reports for the optimal AdWords campaign. Alex Ortiz touches upon a number of advanced techniques such as segmentation through filters. And Tom Leung covered how to enhance your entire user experience using Website Optimizer.

Still aren’t convinced?

Here’s my top 10 Reason’s to use Google Analytics

1. Keywords and Search Traffic – One of the most basic features, but incredibly important. Google Analytics gives you a list of keywords that people have typed into their preferred search engines that have lead them to your site. This gives you an indication of what keywords your site ranks well for, which ones bring you the most traffic and which obscure, long-tail terms your site seems to be attracting. It also shows which search engines helped get the user to your site. Even though Google usually generates the most traffic, sometimes you’ll find that the clicks from Yahoo or MSN may convert better. Knowing this can help you further target your SEO efforts.
2. Referring Sites – Search engines aren’t the only form of online traffic and people will end-up at your site via a link from another site or online directory. Google Analytics not only shows you which sites people have come from, but allows you to set goals for how well these referrals convert, so you can measure not only the amount, but also the quality of the traffic from various sources.
3. Top Content and Navigation Summary - Google Analytics will show which pages on your site generate the most traffic, how long a particular page keeps the readers attention and how people maneuver through your website.
4. Bounce Rate and Visitor Loyalty - This tells you how many people come to your site and leave without going any further and how many people keep coming back time-and-time again. If a page has a particularly high bounce rate, it’s a good idea to look at trying different content to see if you can hold your readers attention and guide them to other parts of your site that they may also find interesting. You can also exclude traffic from certain IP ranges so people from inside your office don’t skew your visitor summaries.
5. Geographic and Local Search Data – Shows where in the world your visitors are coming from, down to the actual city. You can review reports on the percentage of users from various locations and which ones are converting the best. This is great if you have a product or service targeted to a specific region or if you run region-based AdWords… which brings me to the next point…
6. Complete AdWords Integration and Tracking – If you’ve used AdWords before, you’ll know that you can set goals and track performance via the Adwords interface, but Google Analytics takes this one step further by integrating this data into your general site statistics. Some log analyzers will struggle to identify if a click from Google was generated via a paid advertisement or an organic listing - but Analytics can easily make this distinction as well as provide you on data on each campaign, keyword, number of impressions, clicks, cost, conversion etc. etc.
7. Goal Setting - Even if you don’t use AdWords, you can still set goals for various advertising campaigns. Lets say you offer a newsletter or blog - your goal could be to gain more subscribers. If you have an e-commerce site, your goal could be to make sales.
8. Funnel Visualization – What the?? In non-technical terms, this basically means how far a user made it through the sign-up process before bailing out. If you know that 90% of people make it to step 4 but don’t go any further, you can fix the problems and make it easier for people to purchase from you.
9. Customize Your Dashboard – When you open Analytics it will display an overview screen called the ‘Dashboard’. If there are reports or information that you always look at, you can add these to the dashboard quite easily via drag-and-drop functionality. You can even arrange the layout to your liking. Say good bye to non-intuitive interfaces - if you don’t like how it looks, change it!
10. Reporting – How do you like your reports? PDF, in spreadsheet format, emailed to you? Google Analytics provides reports in almost any format you could want and allows you to automate them and email them out whenever you like - so even if you don’t have the time to login, you can still see how your site is performing.

As I said at the start of this article - Google isn’t the best statistics / analytical tool available, but given that it’s free and has a tonne of great features, it’s certainly enough to interest the newbies through to corporate executives.

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