So what is Analytics

Analytics is a simple and free way of tracking the traffic that comes to your website. Analytics is installed very quickly and you see the results within a day or 2. The data you are able to track is extremely large and varied.

Of course you have the simple things like “how many hits does my site get a day, what pages people looked at most, how long they spent on my site”. Then you can go deeper with statistics such as “what browser or operating system the visitor is using, what they typed into Google to find my site, what country the user is from” and much more.

When installed and monitored correctly you can use this data to adapt your website to what the visitors are seeking. For example lets say you check your reports on what pages users visited most and how long they spent on each page. Well if there are certain pages that are very popular and people spend a lot of time on these pages you know you are doing something right on these pages. Now the pages that aren’t so popular, well you get to compare these pages with the popular ones, you can adapt and change the content on the poor pages to be similar to the popular pages. You already know what people like so you give them more of that. And of course with analytics you get to see if these changes have been successful and made the pages more popular. This is the major factor over any other sort of advertising medium out there. It is the instant feedback. You get results of visits to your site from yesterday today. Very quickly. If you stick an ad in a newspaper or send out flyers do you know how people ring you or visit your website because of this ?

Also let’s say you are getting a lot of visits from a specific website which you wrote an article on. Well this tells you that website is popular for you and will be of great benefit so you can put more time and effort into some more articles on that site. This means all your time and effort is going into the right places to help your site improve. What if you spent a lot of money advertising on some sites you were told would be good for your site. Well analytics can tell you if you’re getting value for money. If you aren’t getting the visits you expected from these ads then you change to something else that analytics shows you is working for your site.

Analytics is also easily integrated with Google AdWords which paid for advertising. You get to see what is the way people get to your site. Did they search google, click a google paid for ad, another site recommended you, etc.