Keeping track of the success of your website is important in this age of everyone having a website. At a time when websites just became popular you could know that you had a chance of having some visitors to your site. Over time, not that long of time, there has become a science of finding visitors, luring them to your site, and then making sure that they are interested in your site when they are there. This science has created the wonderful world of search engine optimization. But I am not here to talk about SEO. I am here to tell you that you need to get Google Analytics inserted into each of your pages. This tool is one of the best tools that I have seen in some time that has been a TRUE help to the world of web design. Let me tell you about Google Analytics.

What you see above is the Dashboard of the Google Analytics page that you will have. This area gives you a summary on many areas of traffic that is coming to your site. Some of the key areas that should be watched would be the Traffic Sources Overview and the Content Overview. The reason for these 2 areas is that the Traffic Overview gives you an idea of how people are finding you and then the Content Overview gives you an idea of what pages people are looking at when they go through your site.

Once you have an idea of how people are finding your site and what pages they are looking at, you now will want to take a look at the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate is a percentage of people that leave your site without going any further then the page they started from. So for example, if they start on your home page and they then leave, this is a bounce. Below you will see a picture of the Bounce Rate:

Over time you will get an idea of how the trends are used and what are the important stats to look at daily, weekly, monthly. Google updates the stats every 24 hours. After you have a good idea of how to use the Google Analytics you can start to use Goals. Goals are used in helping you to try to do just that, meet goals that you set on your vistitors.

If you have someone running your website and they are not giving you very detailed stats, you should contact them and ask them to install Google Analytics to all of your pages. If you are doing websites yourself, Google makes it easy by giving you one main Dashboard where you can take care of all your websites.

If you are new to using Google Analytics, here is what you need to do at bare minimum. When you sign up a site with Google Analytics you will be given a website number. Seeing that you would already have a Google Analytics account, you will already have an account number. So right above the end of your body tag, you will add this code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER-WEBSITE NUMBER”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

All you need to do is change the YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER to your account number and the WEBSITE NUMBER to the number Google gave to the site.

This ends a quick summary of the importance of Google Analytics and keeping a close eye on your visitors and what they are doing when they come to your site, while they are at your site, and when they leave. This is very helpful in how your website in built and updated.

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