Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks visitors to your website. It’s both powerful and free, which makes it a no-brainer to use!

Create Account and Login

Go to www.google.com.analytics and sign in. If you don’t have a Google account you’ll need to create one and follow the directions to add the code to your site to start tracking website visitors.

Overview

Once you’ve signed in you’ll get an overview of traffic to your site. Click on “view report” next to the website you’d like to view to see more detailed information.

Select Dates

Google defaults to show you the last 30 days. You can adjust the timeline, which is great for creating monthly analytics reports.

General Info

The general information you’ll see are:

  • Visits – The number of times your site has been visited.
  • Pageviews – The number of pages that have been viewed on your site.
  • Pages/Visit – The number of pages that are viewed on an average visit.
  • Bounce Rate – The percentage of users who visit your site and leave after only visiting one page, which usually means your site isn’t what the user was looking for.
  • Avg. Time on Site – The average amount of time spend on your site.
  • New Visits – The number of users who have not been to your site before.

Selecting each of these topics will allow you to see more detailed information.

Dig In

Dig into each piece of information to get a better view of what your visitors like, and don’t like, in your site. For example, click on Content in the left menu to see what pages are being most visited. Using the data can help you determine what pages are the most popular. This data can give you insight into the pages that are not being visited, or that have high bounce rates. You can also look at how visitors find your website by clicking on Traffic Sources on the left.

Google Adwords

If you have any Adword campaigns you can check the results by clicking Traffic Sources > Campaigns.

Getting Familiar

This is just scratching the surface of Google Analytics, but by checking your analytics weekly and getting familiar with it, you will gain valuable insight into your site and your visitors who will hopefully become customers.