Google analytics tweaks – must read for any site owner!

May 31st, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the importance of tracking your website’s visitors and using that information to improve your site and thus conversion rates,etc. I have just come across a brilliant post by Linda Bustos in which she explains some very useful tweaks and tips to improve the collection of stats regarding your website. (more…)

Do you know anything about your visitors?

May 19th, 2008

This is a follow up to the extremely popular post regarding using website tracking software. I would love to know if you are using any software of this kind. Feel free to express your view in this polll or check out the post here.

[poll id="4"]

Understand your vistors or pay the price

May 14th, 2008

Google AnalyticsI have been using Google analytics for my websites for over two years and I have to say that it has been an extremely useful tool.  It is enormously powerful in that you are able to view just about any statistic you can think of, regarding your site.

You may ask why you need to make use of a service like Google Analytics. Well, the simple answer is you don’t have to use it, but I would highly recommend using it if you are serious about being successful in your business venture.  You can always achieve better results, in any business activity when you are able to receive feedback.  Now, in a bricks and mortar environment, if you wanted feedback from clients you would need to send them a survey or give them a call, but for us in the online world this process can be vastly simplified through tracking your website.  

StatisticsIf you are able to see how many people are viewing your website and for how long, as well as from what countries, you can serve your customers better. You can identify problems or weak spots on your website and then fix them.  Imagine that you sell apples on your site and that you are tracking your visitors. You notice that many people reach the checkout page and then do not complete the sale.  Obviously this is a problem because something is stopping them from completing the sale, you then need to look at improving or streaming your checkout page to make it easier for customers to buy your apples. Now, if you weren’t tracking your visitors and analyzing the data, you would never have know that there was a problem with the checkout page and you would have continued losing valuable business!

That small example above is the essence of the argument for using website tracking software.  I recommend Google Analytics because it is extremely comprehensive and it is free, plus it can be integrated with a Google Adwords campaign. If you would like to recommend a different website or give a give your opinion, please feel free to leave a comment.

 

(Images from Google Analytics)