Google Analytics! Best Marketing Tool

As I am a Freelance Web Designer (www.nicholasburge.com.au) I need to market myself and my skills in order to gain a strong client base.  A great way to track how people find my website and what they are most interested in is by installing Google Analytics.  The below graphs indicates the traffic my website receive for September 2011. I average about 6 views a day with visitors spending 1:37 on my website looking at just under 3 pages per visit.  The peak in the middle of the month was due to a post a made on my Facebook Fan Page regarding a client website I just finished.

Below are my top 3 reasons why it is essential to use Google Analytics on your website.

1. Traffic Source Monitoring
Do you know how people find your site? Which search engine is sending the most traffic to your site? Which is sending the least? Are the ads you placed on other sites actually driving traffic to your website? The Google Analytics tool will tell you which sites people were at before coming to yours. In addition, you’ll learn what people typed into the various search engines to find your web pages. This information is critical to help you discover what is driving traffic so that you can do more of the things that work and less of things that don’t!

2. Page Content
So you wrote a great new content page on your site. I bet everyone’s viewing it, right? The Google Analytics tool will show you how often pages get viewed relative to others on your site. You’ll also know exactly how long people stayed at a particular page. This data will help you prune and adjust page content as well as identify deadbeat pages that are proving to be of little interest to your visitors.

3. Trend Monitoring
The Google Analytics tool provides an easy way to look at dozens of website activities over time. By defining your most important key performance indicators and monitoring them over time, you’ll be able to notice a problem and act immediately before it becomes a serious issue. Trends that are useful to monitor over time include:

  • Average time on site (indication of visitor engagement)
  • Depth of visit (How many pages are viewed before leaving?)
  • Number of unique visitors
  • Number of repeat visitors
  • Bounce rate (# people that leave after viewing only 1 page)

So take the time to install and learn how the Google Analytics tool works and you’ll be well on your way to understanding how your customers navigate your site.

 

Comments (4)

  1. Nice post.

    Thanks for that information i didn’t really know there were programs out there like google analytics. It is handy to know that if i ever have a website there are programs like that to help it take off.

  2. Hey Nick,

    Great work, I had previously heard software could do that for you but now I know which one! Must admit I’ve visited your site a few times – so hopefully my views have contributed to your awesome site.

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