3/10/10  Google Analytics provides very detailed insight into how users are interacting with your website. Placing a small piece of code within each page of your site you will start receiving answers to questions like:

• How many people visited my site during the last month?
• What state (or country) do most of my visitors come from?
• What search words do my  visitors use to find my site?
• Is my site getting any traffic from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…? If so, which ones?

There are a lot of different metrics out there but what really matters is what is affecting the bottom line.

• Visitors: What’s driving traffic (visitors) to your site? keywords, advertising, inbound links.
• Leads: What’s encouraging the visitors to convert to a lead? Offers on page, information that is pertinent to visitor.
• Customers: What’s encouraging the leads to convert to a customer? Ongoing communications, reasons to come back.

But answering some questions is just the tip of the iceberg. With some understanding of what your trying to accomplish with your web site there are a number of ways to dive deeper into these numbers and glean valuable information about just how effective your web presence might be and how to improve.

Here are a few initial tips that all businesses should consider thinking about when establishing a website or reviewing their current web analytics:

• Establish Goals:
  What are you trying to accomplish by having a web site? Are you simply trying to get a presence on the web? Or more customers or do you have a way for visitors to turn into customers by contacting your business off your site?
• Install and Set Up Analytics:
  Google Analytics does many things right out of the box, usually enough for most. If you really want to tap into the power behind the service your going to want to customize and tweak a few things. Google Analytics has an entire section dedicated to setting up what they call  “Goals”. Examples of goals might include when a visitor makes a purchase, registers for an event, or downloads a white paper. Not all goals have an immediate dollar value associated with them, but in many cases you can apply an actual dollar value to them and see how effective your site may be at bringing in sales. You may also find that you want to slice and dice the data that Google Analytics provides you and create your unique report to fit your needs.
• Offer Value to your Visitors:
  What can you offer that is of value to your visiotrs? Some suggestions are: Blog subscriptions, eNewsletters, free guide, free toolkit. And don’t just direct all your traffic to your home page, offer a link to a ‘landing page’ which is designed to convert visitors to leads.  Without this in place, your marketing efforts will seem futile if no visitors are converting.
• Revisit and Review:
  All this work is useless unless you set aside some time to review your analytics and see how your web site is performing. The purpose is to not only to observe, but also react to the information being provided. Your site may need tweaking or your PPC campaign may not be attracting the right visitors to your site. The only way to know is to pay attention to all the juicy information that Google Analytics provides you. It’s all there and all you need is a gmail account. 

Some of this may sound complicated, but with some help from a knowledgeable person, you will be able to more clearly see what is going on with your site’s web traffic. If your serious about using your website effectively for your business or organization you will want to spend some time understanding your analytics and try new things. Need some help? Let us know.