Google Analytics is the best free analytics package out there for keeping track of what is happening on your web site. Why do you care what’s happening on your web site? Because if you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t fix it.

Do you know how many people are visiting your web site? Do you know what pages they are visiting the most? Do you know which pages they are leaving from? do you know which pages they visit the most and how long they stay on those pages?

Think of when you bring your car into the mechanic’s shop. What’s the first thing they do? They hook your car up to the onboard computer to see what it’s analytical systems tell them is wrong.

When I do search engine optimization on a client’s web site, the first thing I have them do is install Google Analytics, because that will tell me everything I need to know about their web site and it’s performance. And then I can monitor the web site’s performance as I make changes to it.

Some of the web design firms I work with sell their own re-branded web site analytics packages. And that’s fine. There are some really good systems out there. But for my money, Google’s free analytics package is all I need.

One quick warming about web site analytics. There’s a real temptation to look at them every day, especially after you’ve changed something on your web site. Don’t. The spiders don’t crawl your web site every day. In fact, it may be a few weeks between visits. so always wait a month between analytics checks.

I have it in my Outlook Calendar to download them at the first of every month. That’s why you’re getting this blog posting today. I just checked my Google Analytics. And I’ve got a few tweaks to make!

Quick tip: you’ll need to have a Gmail account to get Google Analytics. If you don’t already have one, follow this link to Google’s Gmail and sign up. It’s free. Then follow this link to Google Analytics, log in, and follow the instructions to insert the HTML code into each of your web site pages. Or have your web site designer do it for you.

Originally posted 2008-08-01 06:59:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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