Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

If you’re serious about building a business online you need a good web analytics package. In the past decent analytics packages were beyond the reach of most small to mid-sized web operators but today you can get professional level reporting from Google Analytics for FREE.

I won’t be able to cover all the things you can do with web analytics in this short post but suffice it to say if there’s anything you want to know about your visitors, Google Analytics can help you figure it out. Here are just a few things we’ve used our analytics to determine:

• Where should we focus our marketing efforts? Google Analytics helps us understand which traffic sources generate the most pageviews per visitor so we can apply our marketing dollars appropriately. A couple months back we decided to give Facebook ads a try and saw that our Facebook-referred visitors viewed 50% more pages than similar campaigns. Since we saw the ads were more effective we increased Facebook spending while decreasing spending on our other campaigns.
• Where do our visitors live? With Google Analytics you can drill down to a country / state / city to see how many visitors you site receives from a given location. We use this information to guide our new content creation and tweak ad campaigns to target certain geographic regions.
• What keywords are visitors using to find our site? This is super important and informs our search engine optimization strategy. Often the results can be surprising and can lead to new insights into your market or industry.
• How is our site performing in terms of transactions? With Google Analytics you can set up various goals to track such as purchases, new user registrations, etc. We look at these closely and make changes to the site to see how they affect our goal metrics. Not sure if the new checkout page on your site is an improvement? Consult the analytics to see how your conversion rate has changed.

Using an analytics package is crucial if you want to better understand and grow your online business. Just remember, analytics alone won’t get you to your goals - it’s just another tool to help you make decisions.

Google Analytics helps you visualize your online traffic with a simple to use interface.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 7:43 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Web software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.