How many people visit your website? You want to know, don’t you? Even if you’re only curious, don’t you want to know? Let’s talk numbers. That’s this month’s topic.

Businesses Dependent on the Web

If your business is mostly dependent on online sales or website traffic, you already pay attention to your visitor statistics, perhaps in great detail. This edition of the Pacesetter Media newsletter isn’t for you. I suggest you visit Annie Cushing’s website. She spends her days, nights, probably weekends and sleeping hours thinking about data. She has good stuff there.

For Businesses not Dependent on the Web

If you’re like many small businesses, your website is only a part of your marketing. And you never or rarely pay attention to your website statistics. This newsletter is for you.

You can get some important information from visitor statistics. For instance, after you run an ad or exhibit at a trade show, would you like to know if your website traffic increases? When you add a new product page to your site, would you like to know how many people visit that page?

Limitations of Website Statistics

Website data isn’t perfect. All methods of getting statistics miss some visitors. Why? Technical reasons that would only distract from the main topic here. Just realize that you won’t get every visitor counted, nor will you get every detail about any one visitor.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is great for viewing trends and changes in your visitor statistics, and it’s FREE.

• audience (number, language, regional location, browsers)
• traffic sources (referring sites, search engine keywords)
• page visits (number of visits per page)
• and more

The statistics almost any business wants to see include:

Traffic Quantity

Let’s say you exhibit at a trade show or place an ad in a local newspaper for a week. You’d expect to have more visitors that week. The Audience Overview would show you that.

Keyword Searches

Search optimization for an existing site includes a look at the searches that lead visitors to your site. The Queries report shows you that.

Page Views

The Content report shows you which pages on your site are viewed most.

Advanced Statistics

Website data can be as intricate as any other statistical analysis, and GA is not the only option. Whichever statistics tool is used, it takes time to analyze the data in extreme detail. Whether it’s worth it depends on how important your website is to your business.

In any case, the basics are readily available and easy to understand with Google Analytics.

Starting Google Analytics

Here’s how to start:

1. Get an account at Google (if you have a Gmail account, you already have a Google account).
2. Set up a Google Analytics account.
3. Add your website to the GA account.
4. Get a small bit code from GA.
5. Add that bit of code to your site.

There are more details in those steps, but that’s the gist of it.

If Pacesetter Media created your site, we routinely set up GA with new websites. Give us a call, and we’ll get you set up with Google Analytics.

Learn More

For general information, check out Google’s documentation.

• Feature list on Google
• Google Analytics Help