Freebie drawbacks

The analysis of your traffic is very valuable if you want to maximise your return from every visitor arriving on your site.

There are many good stats programs out there enabling you to measure your site traffic and identify any weak spots on your site. Some are free, but the better ones aren’t. Until now! Google has released its own stats program, where it will give you plenty of information, which is just as good as some of the costlier stats programs available. So of course the demand for this service has been overwhelming. Because of this, to get a Google Analytics account you will have to sign up for a standard Google account and then apply for a Google analytics account. You may be waiting several days for both of these to come through – it is worth the wait.

Applying the code

Once you’re in you can set up a new profile for your web site (you can monitor up to 5 web sites). To do this you will have to place a piece of code in the HTML of every page you want to be tracked. After you have done this and verified your site, it may take a few days for the stats to start being generated.

The Benefits 

The analysis of your traffic is very valuable if you want to maximise your return from every visitor arriving on your site. There is a huge amount of data and features available through Google Analytics from basic visitor numbers, right down to the length of visit, average time per page, exit pages, visitor locations, visitor loyalty and much, much more.

You can even view a site overlay, showing where your visitors have clicked. The top right of the page also shows the amount of exits for that page. So you can follow the site through clicking on the links your visitors have clicked on until they leave.

If you have particular goals for your site, let’s say for Castus Design, we want visitors to go on to the portfolio page, or the contact page. Then I can set those pages up as goals in Google Analytics and it will then show me what percentage of our visitors are going to these parts of our site. Very handy indeed if you have a shopping cart or checkout page.

All of these tools allow you to examine your site traffic and give you ideas as to why your visitors are doing what they are doing. As well as giving you ideas on how to improve your site and make your visitors hang around for longer.

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