MacDonald on Marketing

Reviewing and analyzing the volume and behavior of the visitors to your site can help you identify opportunities to save money and increase sales. The best stats tracking service I’ve found is actually free!

Google Analytics is a fantastic service that will give you detailed statistics about your website visitors. Analytics’ incredibly detailed reports will tell you just about anything you can imagine about your visitors:

• How many visitors your site is getting (and you can generate reports by date range for all statistics)
• How many page views your website receives
• Where your site visitors are geographically located
• How your visitors find your site (e.g. search engines, links from other sites)
• The bounce rate — in other words, how many visitors are viewing only the first page and then leaving your site
• The keyword phrases your visitors are using to find you in search engines
• Your visitors’ browser versions and connection speeds
• How often your visitors return, and how recently
• How deeply into your site your visitors click
• How long they spend on your site
• The typical paths users take on your site

Google Analytics can track your conversions for sales, newsletter signups and other goals of your online marketing — even providing breakdowns for different traffic sources. In other words, you can directly compare your return on investment for purchased clicks from many sources.

Using such detailed statistics can help you invest wisely in marketing. You can end ineffective campaigns and increase spending on campaigns that are giving you good ROI. You can save money by test marketing before starting larger marketing or advertising campaigns.

Google Analytics is quite easy to integrate into your website. Go to Google Analytics and either create a Google account or sign in with your existing account. Then set up a website profile for your website. You’ll receive a code snippet. This snippet should go on every page of your website right above the close body tag. Install the code, or ask your web developer to do so (at Simply Brilliant Solutions, our content management system websites have Google Analytics integration so that you can just copy the code into a box in the administrative control panel). Then, go back to the Analytics site and check to make sure that Analytics is receiving data.

Do you have experience with or comments about Google Analytics? Please chime in below!

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