Step 1 - Intro to Web Analytics

  Don't fly blind

Web Analytics refers to technology that allows you to track visitor trends and behavior on your site.   It functions as your radar so that you'll no longer fly blind when it comes to knowing where your new business comes from on the Internet.

Why you need analytics

With Web Analytics, you can know if Google is bringing you more traffic than Yahoo!, how many visits each directory listing brings to your site, which keywords people use to arrive at one of your landing pages, which of your landing pages is the most popular, the time they've spent on your site, how many pages they checked out, if they saw your site and left immediately (this is called a bounce), etc.  More...

Use Google Analytics...it's FREE!

We'll show you how to wield the almighty Google Analytics and teach you only what's necessary to further enhance the profitability of your business.   Google Analytics is a type of analytics program that uses something called page tagging.  More...

Important Pieces of Google Analytics

  Keywords

If it seems like everything with regard to your Internet marketing campaign revolves around your keywords, well it’s a reality. Your keyword portfolio and Paid Search keyword list certainly comes into play when inspecting your traffic stats.  

You must know which search engines your visitors are coming from and the exact keyword search terms they are using to find your site.  More...

    Page Views

Page views are defined as the total number of times that a whole page is called by a browser.  This is a much better way to evaluate your traffic when compared to hits.  A hit occurs when a request is made to your server.  More...

       Entrance Pages

From your Paid Search and SEO efforts, you’re theoretically trying to get as many qualified visitors as possible to arrive at your site.  The reality is that your visitors are coming through totally different avenues, i.e. entrance pages. 

Yes, loads of visitors will enter through your home page but what if a disproportionate amount of traffic enters through your Forum or F.A.Q.s pages?  This should be an alert to you that each and every page needs to be properly structured and carefully optimized to achieve a set of specific objectives.  More...

   Bounce Rate

Just as it’s important to learn of which pages are actually entrance pages, it behooves you to know about people leaving or "bouncing" from your site.  A bounce is a single page view per session – so, a visitor just takes off after looking at only one of your web pages. 

Looking at this metric can be very informative because if people are bouncing from your all-important landing pages, then you definitely need to tweak something somewhere because you’re going after the wrong audience or maybe speaking over their heads.  More...

      Unique Visitors

With all of this talk about people going to and leaving from your site, it’s important to have a “macro” big-picture view of your site visitors.  Although it’s not completely accurate, looking at your total number of unique visitors does give you a trend to look for over time.  More...

       Traffic source

Wouldn’t it be useful to know where these unique visitors are coming from?  The traffic source, also called a referrer, tells you about the visitors who clicked to get to your site from another site.  More...

  Total Time on Site

A site’s performance can also be assessed on the basis of how long your users are staying on your site. A site with an appreciable amount of multimedia and content can be evaluated based on this factor – it tells you how involved your visitors are.  

Total time on a site also has a bearing on your search engine rankings since it gives spiders some indication of how useful your site is to visitors.  More...

      Monitor crucial info with analytics

You'll find Google Analytics to be highly useful irrespective of the size of your business.   For small businesses, check analytics once a week and sift through the data with a watchful eye on the important pieces mentioned above.

For large businesses and corporations, you could actually have an entire team devoted to analytics and you'll consider using any of the following professional Web Analytics programs:  Urchin, Compete, Omniture, or Coremetrics.

Keep in mind that signing up for Google Analytics is totally free!