Do Good Design

What pages on your website are most popular? What countries do your visitors come from?

You can find out all of this and more with website traffic tracking software, also known as “analytics”.

The software I use and recommend is Google Analytics, which is free and pretty easy to use.

By knowing more about what is happening on your website, you’ll find out how valuable it is and what you can do to make it work a lot better.

Why you should take 5 minutes to learn about Google Analytics

You’ve probably got better things to do than learn another piece of software, but I promise, it’s pretty easy to use and it’s worth it.

Using Google Analytics will do 2 very important things. It will:

1) Save you money

and

2) Tell you what your customers want

How to save yourself some money

Figure out whether paid advertising is working for you.

Belong to an organisation that claims they’ll bring traffic to your website? Find out for sure by tracking how many people are coming to your website from theirs. Find out whether those people are making a booking, buying something, signing up for your newsletter and so on.

Find out what your customers want

Learn which articles your visitors like the most, what search terms they’re using to find you. Then give them more of what they want if possible, by featuring those items prominently or writing new articles on a hot subject.

By looking at “Top Content” and “Keywords” in the Google Analytics report, you can build traffic to your website.

Getting started: some good tutorials

I like video tutorials where you see what to do onscreen. A good one to get you started with setting up and using Google Analytics is this excellent video tutorial from Conversation Marketing.

Important stats to look at

Once you’ve started, here are some good things to look at in your report:

Page views per visit
How many pages are people looking at on your site? Generally, the more the better since that means people are interested in what’s on your site.

Writing for the web can do a lot to raise these numbers.

Referring Sites
This tells you which websites people are coming from, and who have links to you.

In some cases, a referring website might be worth developing a relationship with, if you like what they do and vice-versa. You can meet some great people and complementary businesses this way.

Search terms/Keywords
What kind of information are people searching for, and what words do they use in a search engine to find you?

Help out your visitors by using some of those keywords in a relevant article title and body. It’ll increase your search engine rankings and make it that much easier for people to know they’re in the right place when they come to your site.

Get started

Hopefully, I’ve persuaded you to give analytics a try if you haven’t already done so. Doing so puts you more in control of your website and that can only help your business.

What to do next

Managing your website is just one of the 4 Building Blocks of a Successful Website. Find out what else your website should be doing to be successful.