Google Analytics (for those of you who have been hiding under a rock these past few years) is a Free online Analytics reporting program to track website visitors. In fact, that doesn’t do it justice as it does far more than that and can help you track and understand how your website is views and interacted with. Might not sound all that thrilling, but knowing where your visitors enter your website and leave it can help you to fix problems such as 404 errors and many other issues.
If you run your own website for enjoyment sharing family photos, blogging about your favourite sport or anything inbetween. You may not have come across Google Analytics or any other type of website statistics programs. However, if you run a website where the visitor statistics really matter to you, then you’ll have probably tried out Google Analytics or at the very least – you should have!
So why do you need these statistics other than to be able to gloat to your friends that you’ve had X number of visitors? Well knowing what content is popular on your website is handy, especially if you write about a lot of different things. Knowing that lots of visitors to your website are interested in Blue Widgets is handy because you can concentrate on writing about Blue Widgets. Especially if you intend to monetize your website. However, you may like writing about Blue Widgets, but also have an interest in Red Widgets so even though you get very few visits to your Red Widgets pages. You can take this information and build upon it to find out where you’re going wrong. First off, you need to think to yourself, are people interested in the Red Widget? So you need to go and take a look at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Here you can find out whether there are a lot of searches for them each month. If there are lots of searches, well now you can drill it down using that tool to find out longtail search keywords people are searching for since your “Red Widgets” blog posts aren’t getting visitors. Maybe “best Red Widgets” or “cost of Red Widgets” is something you can write about and hope to pick up more visitors from.
So as you see, Google Analytics and similar statistics can be very useful and help you understand where your visitors are coming from (which search terms), what content they visited (although we don’t know if they read it) and then ultimately, which page they decided to leave your website from.
