Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an essential - and free - tool to help you monitor everything that's going on with your website.

It's interesting that I started my career in radio, where listening figures are worked out by giving people 'listening diaries' ... a bit of an unreliable system for finding out how popular your product is.

I came to the web later on in my career, but quickly discovered that where websites are involved you get comprehensive, empirical data about virtually every aspsect of your business ... how many, who, where, how long ... you name it, you can find it out.

Google Analytics is the ideal 'entry level' way to start collecting this data.

Why do you need this data?

Any new business should be based on market research ... there's no point starting a business that nobody wants.

Once that business is launched you need to know how you're performing and that process should never stop.

You need to know:

# How many people are visiting your website?

# How many pages are they looking at?

# Which pages are most popular?

# Which pages aren't performing well?

# How are people finding your website?

# What pages are they on when they leave your site?

# Which search engines are referring users to your website?

# Which countries are your searches coming from?

This is essential customer data which will allow you to up your game, find out where you're going right - and wrong - and hopefully build a better and stronger business as a result.

Google Analytics will give you most of this data, even though more comprehensive systems - paid for and free - are available, and it's well worth being acquainted with it features when you start your home internet business.

Here are just some of the features that are built in:

# Find out where your visitors come from and identify your most lucrative geographic markets.

# See traffic and conversion information for every link as you browse your site.

# Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords and identify your revenue sources.

# Find out how your visitors search your site, what they look for and where they end up.

# Buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business.

# Track and compare all your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links and keywords on Google and other search engines.

All of the data provided is presented in a clear, easy-to-understand and customizable way.

Getting Google Analytics set up

It's really pretty straightforward to get set up, but you do need access to the HTML for your pages and have a basic working knowledge about how to 'cut and paste' HTML into a page and then upload it via FTP.

If this is all a foreign language to you, it might be worth swatting up on some basics before you get started with Google Analytics.

There are considerable advantages to creating your website layout in a template formation as the key to using this analytical system is to paste some customized HTML into each web page that you want to track.

That's a bit of a drag if you already have lots of pages, so brace yourself for a bit of coding work if your site is already well established.

It's as simple as that really ... once you add the code to the pages you want to track, Google Analytics confirms that it can 'see them', gather data, then starts compliling user reports based on whatever parameters you care to draw up.

A comprehensive range of 'how to' guides is provided, so I won't repeat that information here.

However, if you're just starting your home internet business I really do recommend that you set up this system of site review and assessment at the earliest opportunity as it really does provide you with superb website intelligence and information.

A more complex and possibly more comprehensive alternative is Awstats which is a free analytics tool, but definitely not for the website beginner.

Also it's worth being familiar with Alexa ranking resources as part of your website review activities.

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