A website and blog can be one of the most direct and effective ways to connect with your customers. To maximize your return on this investment, you need to be able to collect and analyze data about where your website views are coming from, how your users interact with your website, and how many times each page (or blog entry) in your site is being viewed.

Google offers a free service called Google Analytics to make website analytics simple for websites large and small. Configuring Google Analytics for your website does not take much time and has a huge payoff. Here is how to get started (pass this on to whoever manages your website):

• Go to http://www.google.com/analytics
• Go through the sign up process – if you don’t have a Google account, you will need to set on up; note that Google allows anybody to sign up, regardless of your e-mail address
• During the sign up, you will need to provide some basic information regarding your website; if you have multiple websites, you can add more later
• At the end of the sign-up process, you will be given instructions on how to add the tracking code to your page; simply copy and paste the code right before the “</body>” tag of each page on your website

If you operate a blog, the instructions above may be slightly different. WordPress has plug-ins that can be installed to enable Google Analytics. For BlogSpot, you will need to edit the layout HTML.

Google Analytics includes additional tools for eCommerce sites that are also incredibly useful.

No matter the size and scope of your web presence, you should be taking advantage of Google Analytics. If you have a blog, I strongly recommend implementing Google Analytics there as well.

If you would like additional information or help in implementing Google Analytics, please Contact Us.