Keep track of your website traffic with Google Analytics
Why is monitoring website traffic so valuable?
Website statistics (or, “traffic monitoring”) applications have gotten very powerful over the last few years. They’ve replaced the old, “website counter” with something far more useful for website owners (and i daresay gets those eyesores off of web pages). What you can view now is a website owner is information, not just about how many people came to your site, but also:
- how long they stayed there
- what pages they looked at
- approximately where they are
- what time of day they visited your site
- and, probably MOST important: how they got to your website
Taking a look at whether your website visitors and customers are finding you via search engines, or arriving at your site via links from other sites, or just simply typing your URL in to a browser can be of great importance and great value.
With that information, you can leverage your popular points of entry to gain even more traffic and/or purchases, or perhaps you will discover an area where you need to improve, or barriers that your website visitors are coming up against that are literally stoping them from being able to make a purchase or take that action you want them to take.
The website analytics tool I typically recommend is Google Analytics. They have a great product video intro, that you can view here, and get a little bit of a better idea of how it works and what the software can do for you. …best of all, it’s free!
Here at Evolution Studios we make it a point to make sure that every client has some sort of analytics / website traiffic monitoring software package. We typically install Google Analytics for clients, at no charge, and help with questions our clients might have in interpreting the data, or understanding what the reports mean.
Make sure that you have Google Analytics installed, and take the mystery out of understanding your website visitors!