In Part One of this article, I explained the benefits of using Webmaster Tools to discover and manage how well your website is being seen by Google. In this second part we’ll dive a little deeper into Google’s web tools offerings, specifically the insightful Google Analytics.
Analytics is a free and powerful tool offered by Google that allows you to track and analyze how customers interact with your website. Analytics gives you access to useful statistics such as how a customer arrived at your site, where they went while on your site, and how you can keep them coming back to your site. If you aren’t already using Analytics to forecast customer behavior on your website, you should be.
So, what’s the best way to get started using Analytics? Jump on over to the Google Analytics homepage and create an account for your website. You will need to install a simple tracking code in the header of your website that allows Google to gather data about how users interact with different pages of your site. Once the tracking code is successfully installed it will take about a week for Google to begin showing the data it’s collecting. The fun really starts once you have enough data to begin noticing trends. Are people leaving your website too soon? Are there certain pages that record hardly any visits? Is a certain search term bringing more traffic than the others? These are just a few of the important questions that Analytics will answer for you.
We install both Analytics and Webmaster Tools on each and every site we take live. It’s a crucial step on our pre-launch checklist that provides you with invaluable data that will help drive your business in the right direction.
