Who\’s visiting your website? Any idea?

This question lies at the heart of online success. You can only improve what you measure. But before we get into it, I need to explain something to you – something incredibly important.

There are no secrets on the internet.

Simple, but powerful. On the internet, everything can be tracked. If you’re curious what people are searching for, you can find out. If you’re curious which products are selling the best, you can find out. If you want to know where people are coming from and where they’re going, you can find out.

The process of measuring all this online activity is called website analytics, and everything on the internet can be tracked. Turns out, you can access some amazingly powerful tools without spending a penny … enter Google Analytics, stage left.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Let’s break it down. Using Google Analytics, you can see:

□ How many people are visiting your website.
□ The keywords they used to find you on search engines.
□ Which website referred them to you.
□ What page they saw first.
□ How much time they spent on your site.
□ How many pages they visited.
□ What page they left your site from.
□ The geographic location of your visitors.
□ The browser they’re using.
□ And a host of other facts, figures and statistics!

Installing Google Analytics is simple and free. Once you sign up for an account, the platform gives you a small piece of script (computer code) that you need to put into the footer of your website. Once complete, Google starts tracking all the activity on your website.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of all this. You could track everything you do online and know with certainty what’s working and what’s not. There are no secrets. You can know without any shadow of a doubt. That’s powerful stuff.

In the past, you would’ve had to do surveys or focus groups to gain insights to these topics. No longer. On the internet, you can see it all.

Let’s take one example. Using Google Analytics, you can see your “bounce rate”. That’s the percentage of people who quickly leave your website after viewing any particular page.

Now, just to be clear, you do not want people leaving your website. You want them to keep browsing. If they’re leaving your site from one particular page, you need to improve that page to keep your visitors interested.

With Google Analytics, you could list all of your webpages sorted by their respective bounce rates. The ones with the highest bounce rate are the ones that need the most attention. Work on those pages to keep visitors interested and engaged.

Every time you do this one simple exercise, your website will be a bit more effective than it was before. This is just one example, but there are dozens. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful platform and it gives you the opportunity to systematically improve your website.

There are a lot of other platforms that provide analytics data and some of them are very good. You’re welcome to use whichever platform you like. I focused on Google Analytics in this chapter because it’s free, powerful and extremely well used.

Author Bio: Patrick is the author of \”Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed\” (2011, Wiley) and a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV. Watch his video about Google Analytics on YouTube.

Category: Business
Keywords: patrick,schwerdtfeger,google,analytics