Using Google to Track Your Web Site Traffic For Free

You have your web host, you have carefully designed your web site, and now you have ventured into the wonderful world of e‑commerce. Undoubtedly, your web host will offer a statistics package to track some basic information on your site. Depending on what they track you could get information on everything from the total number of visitors to what web browser they are using.

If you are planning on making money from your web site you will want more information to analyze and fine tune your web marketing efforts. Successful web marketers track how long visitors spend on their sites, which pages they visit, which page they left the site from, why they left from those pages, some even want to know what type of connection was used and when they visited. The good news is that you can get all of that information and more for free, courtesy of Google http://www.google.com/analytics

How can you use all this information? Well, let's say after tracking your site, you find that one of your pages has a high exit rate. You could analyze the page to see why people are leaving, so you could then make changes and track if the exit rate goes down. You could fine tune your entire site and get feedback on how it is working within 24 hours. But, this is only one example.

I use it to track my web site hits on my Blog, and see what percentage of new readers become subscribers. With the software installed I can see who sent new traffic, how long they stayed, if my post is interesting, and I am able to use the information to make changes to my topics. I am also able to judge my readers loyalty by how many times and how long they spend reading.

I have only scratched the surface of all the cool features in this tool. It is the first thing I look at online each day to see how my sites are doing, but you can also track sales, set up goals, track visitors all the way through the order process.

If you chose to track your sales data, there is a whole variety of additional reports that can be generated including conversion rate, amount earned per visitor, and more Setting up Google Analytics

Let me first make it clear that I am not a web design expert, and I had no problem installing this and getting it to work without crashing my Blog, which is where I decided to try it.

If you are not an expert in HTML, I would suggest you copy the code from your web page into your HTML editor. Play with placement and preview to make sure you don't mess things up before doing it live on your site. That way if you do make a mistake you simply close the editor without saving your changes.

After signing up, you will need to set up a new website profile. Click on the "Create New Profile" tab and fill in your site details. The form is pretty straight forward and can be completed in just a few minutes.

After completing your profile, all you have to do is copy and past the tracking code onto the page you want to track. If your site has a header or footer that comes up on every page, just copy the code there, and all of your pages will be tracked.

Once the tracking code is inserted, Google will update your statistics every 24 hours. Congratulations you now have all the tools to become an internet marketing guru!

You can contact me, or find more information on this and other subjects on my Blog.