Track your visitors with Google Analytics
Friday's blog post (Monitor your traffic with LiveZilla) was all about using LiveZilla to monitor your website traffic and also offer live chat support to your visitors.
LiveZilla is great, but it's only a short term traffic monitoring tool.
If you want to look back at the past week or month or even year LiveZilla won't be much help.
Many servers come pre-installed with awstats and webalizer. These programs are great and I'll be writing some more in-depth reviews on these at a later date.
So today I want to focus on Google Analytics.
Analytics (meaning analysis) basically analyses your website traffic.
Why bother?
Well, if you're running any form of marketing campaigns you'll want to know how successful they are. It could be PPC (Pay Per Click), article submission, directory submission or some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques you've deployed.
If you're paying for marketing on your website you'll want to know which methods are giving you your best ROI. Analytics will show you which method is bringing in most traffic - providing your marketing methods are trackable
Once signed up for Google Analytics you'll be given a small piece of JavaScript code. Just copy this code into every page you want to monitor. This may sound like a long process but most CMS (Content Management Systems) pull their content from a database so only one page is actually used to pull the data. Just paste the code into the page and it'll appear on all pages of the site.
Analytics has some really useful and advanced features.
For example; if you want to monitor how many people sign-up to your newsletter you can setup Analytics to log 'Goals' or 'Conversions'.
When someone enters their name and email address they might be taken to www.yoursite.com/signup_success.php. Let Analytics know that this page is the completion of a goal and it will start monitoring it.
You can also use 'funnel goals'. This is when the user most go through a number of pre-defined pages before the goal is logged. This prevents miss-recording of goals.
So if you're running a marketing campaign to get people to subscribe to your newsletter Analytics will tell you how many people are subscribing each day and also where these people are coming from.
Analytics breaks your traffic right down into which keywords are landing visitors to your site, which search engines are bringing in most traffic and even the top referring sites that are bringing in the punters.
So go ahead, sign up now for Google Analytics to learn more about your visitors and where they're coming from.
See you tomorrow at 09:00
Simon
