If you have a website, you should definitely have Google Analytics.

If you have a website, and you have no idea what Google Analytics is, read on!

As stated in previous blog posts, your website is an extension of your business. It represents you within the world wide web, and it should educate your visitors about who you are and what you do. We can tell you all about what your website should be doing, but what are your visitors doing? Who are they? How long do they stay on your site, and what pages are they looking at? What kind of browsers do they use?

All of these questions are answered quickly if you have a free Google Analytics account. “But I don’t have time to look at tons of statistics and data!” you might say. Don’t worry, Google Analytics puts everything into lovely, easy to understand graphs and tables so you can get all of the important information at a glance.

You can learn:
• How many people come to your website daily/weekly/monthly
• How long people spend on your site
• What pages people are looking at on your site
• Where your website traffic comes from
• What keywords people are using to find your site
• What web browsers are used by your visitors
• So much more!

Why is this important?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you improve your website so you can get even MORE traffic! There’s no point in paying for a website if no one visits, so make sure you are actually bringing people in.

If most of your visitors use Internet Explorer, but your site doesn’t load correctly in that browser, you should probably get that fixed.

If people are only spending five seconds on your site and then leaving, you should figure out why they are leaving and correct the issue. Is your content boring? Is your site unpleasant to look at? Is your navigation broken?

If twice as many people visited after you posted something to Facebook asking them to visit your site, you should continue using Facebook to send people to your site.

There are so many ways using this simple data will help you improve your website, and the best part is, it’s FREE! It’s also very easy to use, and Google will spell everything out for you with their many help articles. If you haven’t already, you should go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ now and create an account. Plug the handy dandy little code snippet into your website (or have your web designer do it for you), and voila! You are ready to start collecting data and improving your website.