Keep Track of Visitors to Your Website with Google Analytics

Keeping track of your visitors is important to all website owners. It gives you insight on a variety of statistics that can help you determine the direction your website will take. Face it, if you don't have returning visitors, then there is something wrong with your site.

But you won't even know that if you don't track who is coming and going. Google offers a free anaylytics service that I think is great! The reports show so many statistics including the basics like: returning vs. new visitors, keywords searched to get to your site, location of the visitors, what page was the entry page or exit page, how many pages were viewed by a visitor and so much more! The list goes on and on.

The setup for Google Analytics is pretty easy. You can sign in with an existing gmail account or create a new one. Once you have an account, the only step left is to paste the code into the page you want tracked. I personally pasted the code in to my main template so each page automatically will have the tracking.

Once the code is in place you will be able to monitor the visits to your site. Looking at your statistics will give you a better idea of what your current patrons are interested in, what's working and what's not.

Of course there are other companies out there that will monitor your usage. But they aren't free and I haven't found one yet that measures up to Google Analytics.