I met a client a couple of week’s ago who said they never had time to look at their web stats (and they ran an online retail business – eek). This prompted me to write this post in my Some Really Useful Stuff section.
If your answer is ‘No’, you should be worried! Or maybe I should ask, why bother to have a website in the first place then?
If you have a website, even if it is a fairly static brochure style site, you should have a good website analytics package in place to track who visits, where they came from, what keywords brought them to your site in the first place, and what content they look at (and for how long). If you have an ecommerce or online retail business, this is a must have and it’s critical to your online business success.
I, along with millions of other website owners, use and recommend Google Analytics and for a free bit of kit, it cannot be beaten in my opinion. But you have to ACTUALLY use it to get the real benefit.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS – MY TOP TIPS:
Did you know that you can schedule your reports to be emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly? No more excuses for being too busy and forgetting to access the reports. It really takes the hassle out of tracking and reporting your website performance.
You can also customise the report using the Dashboard, simply drag and drop the data fields you want to see each month. You can always drill down further if something interesting catches your eye. Go for a top-line monthly report – don’t dump everything in your monthly report or you just won’t read it and more importantly, take any necessary action upon it!
Make sure you use the Goals functionality. It’s one of the most powerful tools in there for measuring conversion against your website objectives.
If you don’t know where to start, drop me a line.