Using Google Analytics for Your Website

Google Analytics is fairly well known software created by Google. Analytics, as it is sometimes called, provides website statistics and tracking for an overall understanding of how effective your website is.  We recommend installing Google Analytics onto every website that we create.  Here are a number of reasons why:

• It’s free to use and to access
• There are books that have been written about it, so resources exists to learn more
• There continues to be more and more development and new features coming resulting in an overall better product.
• It’s made, supported, and developed by an industry giant, Google!
• It is hands down the best website tracking software on the market, especially for free!

Now that you know why you should get Google Analytics Installed on to your site, here are a few tips to ensure you are using it to its maximum potential:

• Make sure that the tracking code is on every single page or it won’t track all the pages
• Exclude your IP Address from the settings so that Analytics is not tracking the clicks from your office
• Setup multiple goals and funnels, it’s the only way to track what is meaningful.
• Setup the reporting to email you the pdf each month, this way you don’t have to go looking for it
• Add any additional users that you want to have access to the reporting

Ok…so you are all setup and configured and you have waited about 30 days and you see all these statistics….but what do they mean?  How do you know if you are doing well or not?

• It’s too difficult to tell you what a good traffic number is, because each business and each industry is different.  However what I can tell you is that if you are doing the work on your website monthly, then your Unique Visitors should be trending UP.
• Bounce rate should be between 40% and 60%.  The lower the number the better.

• Note that bounce rate is determined by looking at what visitors entered on that particular page and failed to go to any other page before leaving the website.

• Goal numbers should be trending up
• Time on site should be trending up
• Trending……..one final note on trending.  It’s not odd to see a drop from one month to another, but when we talk about trending we are talking about 6-12-18 months at a glance.  If you look back over that time, are you trending up.  If you are not, then you need to consider getting some help to fix that.

Happy Analyzing.