In This Chapter

How is your online advertisement doing for you? How many hits did your new product page get this week? Which search engine keywords are visitors using to find your website? Where in the world are your potential customers located? Which other websites are referring their visitors to yours?

Wouldn’t it be handy to have this information? You can, with website analytics. This chapter explains how to find and use a good analytics program to increase traffic, boost conversions, and reduce your marketing costs.

Say your website is humming along nicely and then, one day, for no apparent reason, you get a bunch of new sign-ups for your e-mail newsletter. Your orders spike, too. Obviously there has been a surge of traffic to your website.

That’s great news! Certainly a reason to celebrate. But exactly where did all that unexpected activity, on that particular day, come from? Was it your advertising? Was it your article in a key publication? Was it the interview you gave to that blogger? Those potential customers found out about your website somehow. Something you did worked—and worked very well. If only you knew what it was, you could do more of it!

That’s where website analytics can help.

For example, a few months ago I placed a banner advertisement on two similar websites. I suspected I would get a comparable response, in terms of traffic generated, from each ad. Not so. According to my analytics report, the banner on the first website generated a ton of new traffic while the banner on the second got hardly any clicks at all!

Imagine if I didn’t know that. I would have kept on sinking money into both advertisements, unaware that one of them wasn’t working.

As you can probably guess, I’m a big fan of website analytics. For the web-based business owner, it’s a must.

And because website analytics programs are so affordable and easy-to-use, there is absolutely no reason for you to be in the dark about where your potential customers are coming from and what they’re doing while on your website.

You need this information to make your business profitable. Without a good website analytics program, it’s like flying a plane without a window or even a dashboard! You’ll crash and burn.

You might be surprised by how much information a website analytics program can give you about the people who visit your website and their activity once there.

There are many good website analytics programs available, but for the purposes of this section—and, indeed, most of this chapter—I’m going to use Google Analytics as an example. It’s the program I use and one that is fairly representative of analytics programs in general.

Here is a list of the most common types of information that my Google Analytics program monitors for me:

Wow. Sure beats the old days of the Internet when the most you could do was put a hit counter on your home page!

Like most good analytics programs, Google does a great job of making the information easy to view and understand. The dashboard screen contains a lot of useful information at a glance, such as the percentage of new versus returning visitors, and a pie chart showing you where your visitors are coming from. Clicking any of the main buttons on the navigation bar drills you down to more in-depth information.

In a way, website analytics is like being the manager of a traditional retail store, watching the floor from the window of your elevated office. You can see your customers coming in, notice how long they’re saying, monitor which aisles they visit, and note which products they look at most.

The amount of information you can gather from most good website analytics programs is so vast that you couldn’t possibly use all that information. You’d need a staff! (In fact, many large companies have staff dedicated to analyzing these types of reports.) So as a small web-based business owner, what is the least you need to track in order to get the most out of your website analytics program?

The most important analytic you need to know concerns where your traffic is coming from. After all, you probably spend a lot of time, effort, and money on marketing your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to know which of those activities are paying off and which are not?

In Internet marketing lingo, this is called traffic sources. Traffic sources can come from search engines, blogs, advertising, other websites, and more.

A few months ago, for example, I noticed that a lot of traffic was being referred to me from a website I had never heard of before. So I visited it and discovered that it is a popular site among my target audience and, hurray, they accept article submissions and advertising. Ultimately that website resulted in hundreds of new potential customers for my business. I doubt I would have discovered it if not for my analytics program.

In addition to traffic sources, you’ll also want to know which pages on your site your visitors go to most. In analytics lingo, this is called content. Say, for example, your analytics program is telling you that plenty of people are visiting a sales page promoting a particular product but no one is buying. Then you know that traffic isn’t your problem, it’s the page itself. For whatever reason, it’s not convincing visitors to place an order. You might need to rewrite that marketing copy!

Basically, you want to monitor enough information with your analytics program so you know how visitors are finding you, what pages they are looking at on your site, and the effectiveness of those pages.

To get analytics reports you need a good analytics program. But before you run out and buy new software, or sign up for an online service, take a look at your web hosting plan (see Chapter 11).

Many web hosting companies offer analytics—sometimes referred to as site reports—as part of their hosting packages. In fact, you might already have analytics reports available to you and don’t even know it!

The quality of analytics programs built into web hosting plans varies widely. You have to find out if the one that comes with your plan provides you with all the information you need. If it does, then there’s really no reason to invest in a separate analytics software or service.

If, however, your hosting plan doesn’t include the analytics reports you want, then you’re going to need to find another solution. Fortunately, there are several good programs available that provide you with a wealth of analytics information and are all relatively inexpensive. Some, in fact, are free.

Here is a list of website analytics programs designed specifically for the needs of the small web-based business owner:

Like any software or online service, be sure to review all the features carefully. The program needs to be able to accurately track all the information indicated earlier in this chapter and provide you with reports that are easy to interpret and use.

When assessing a potential analytics software or online service, take advantage of any free trials or demos that are available. This will give you a chance to find out if the program will generate all the reports you need. You will also learn how easy, or difficult, the program is to use. At the very least, you need to be able to track the number of first-time and repeat visitors to your site during a given period, where those visitors are coming from, and which pages on your site they’re going to.

Once you select a website analytics program, take the time to familiarize yourself with all the features. Most programs allow you to customize the reports so that they’re automatically generated for you, which can be a real timesaver.

A few years ago Google turned the website analytics software industry on its ear by offering a robust analytics service for websites absolutely free. All you have to do is sign up, plug the HTML code provided onto the website pages you want to track and—voilà—the system generates a wealth of information you can view online.

I use Google Analytics and have been very satisfied with the amount of information and useful reports I can access. As a result, I’ve never felt the need—so far—to purchase a more advanced analytics solution.

Google Analytics is free—so far. But there’s no telling when they might add a premium service level that you’ll have to pay for.

If you’re just starting out in your web-based business, I suggest you begin with Google Analytics. It will provide you with all the information you need to monitor traffic sources, website visitor activity on your site, and much more. And it won’t cost you a cent.

Getting started with Google Analytics is really easy. To sign up, just go to Google. com/analytics and click the Sign Up Now link. Then enter the e-mail you’d like to use for your Google account and pick a password. (If you already have a Google account, then you don’t need another one. Just use that same username and password to sign in to Google Analytics.)

When you sign in for the first time, you’ll have some initial set-up to do. You’ll need to fill in your website address and what time zone you’re in. And you’ll have to agree to the terms and conditions.

Once you’ve done all that, Google will provide the tracking code that you need to install on your website. If you have more than one website to track, you can enter them all at the set-up stage, or add them later.

Be sure to paste the tracking code provided by Google in a safe place, such as Microsoft Notepad or a similar program. The code must be saved as a text file. Some word processing programs, like Microsoft Word, alter the code when you paste it into a document. In most such programs, you should be able to use the “save as” command and then select “plain text.”

To install the Google Analytics tracking code on your website pages, you need to go into your site’s html programming and find the </body> tag for each page. Then, copy the tracking code that Google Analytics provided you after the <body> tag and before the </body> tag.

Feeling a little nervous? If you’re uncomfortable working with the HTML code of your website yourself, your website designer can do the job for you. Depending on the amount of pages, it only takes a few minutes.

If you’re using a website builder software or service of some kind, such as SiteSell. com or GoDaddy’s Website Tonight, you can contact the support department. They’ll safely walk you through the process of pasting the code into your website pages.

Once you’ve finished pasting the code on your web pages, you need to test it.

From the Google Analytics Tracking Instructions screen, click the Continue button. You’ll see your settings so far, and the Status field at the far right of the Website Profile section will indicate if tracking has been installed.

If you get a message that says “Tracking Not Installed,” don’t panic. Click Check Status. Google will then check your site for the tracking code and let you know if it finds it or not. If it doesn’t find the tracking code, then you need to try pasting it in a different area on your pages and then test it again. If the problem still persists, make sure that the tracking code is correct. It’s possible that you missed part of the code while cutting and pasting. (I’ve made that mistake a few times!)

Google has a very good library of common questions, so search their database of helpful tips. If you still have problems, call your website designer or web builder software tech support.

Most people don’t have any problems getting their Google Analytics to work. So hopefully, you’ll be one of them!

Each website analytics program varies slightly in the way it generates reports. However, most require you to log in to a special screen. From there you typically see an overview screen with the basic information highlighted for you. Then you can click each category, for example New Visitors, to see more specific data.

Let’s take a look at how to view reports in Google Analytics as an example.

To see the incredible range and depth of information that the system is tracking for you, sign into your Google Analytics account. Then click the View Report link next to the website you want data for. (Google Analytics lets you track more than one site.)

Google does a pretty good job of providing you with a lot of useful information at a glance. As soon as you log in you’ll be greeted with an easy-to-understand dashboard screen, which will show you a graph of the daily number of visitors you’ve had over the past month. You’ll also be able to click the main link to take a quick overview look at Visits, Pageviews, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time On Site, and New Visits statistics.

You can then use the navigation bar on the left to get very specific data on each category. For example, you can click the Content link and find out what your most popular website page is and the average time visitors spend on it.

I remember years ago, before the Internet became popular, placing an ad in a local business directory and never really knowing for sure if it worked. Was it worth the $720 I paid for the ad space? I had, at best, only a fleeting idea that it may have.

These days, on the Internet at least, you don’t have to wonder if your marketing money is going down the drain. A good website analytics program can help you get the most out of your marketing efforts and budget by providing you with the information you need to quickly find out what’s really working and what isn’t.

Using website analytics will improve your marketing, since you’ll be keeping a watchful eye on the sources of your visitors and the performance of your web pages. You’ll know what content on which pages tends to draw people in, and very quickly learn what they don’t like. Monitoring your keywords and traffic sources will help you target and segment your marketing, making your efforts work even harder for you.

Here are a few examples of the decisions you can make based on the information that your analytics program provides you:

Analytics help you make smarter decisions regarding your web-based business, so you can grow faster and more profitably. It’s a no-brainer. Get a good website analytics program!

The Least You Need to Know