You already know your visitors are the life blood of your business. The more you know about them, the more you can target offers to them that will make you money.
One of the best tools for doing that is a free tool from Google called Google Analytics.
Once you sign up for Google Analytics you simply place a small piece of code on each of your web pages (this can be easily done in WordPress by simply modifying the footer) and from that point on Google watches every one of your visitors and gives you tons of stats.
What does Google Analytics tell you? This is a brief list.
- Where your visitors came from
- How long they stayed on your site
- What keywords are being typed into what search engines to get to your site
- How many pages and the exact pages your visitors visited
- Whether they bought a product or not
- How your PPC or other advertising campaign is performing
- Whether someone joined your list and who sent them
- What links people are clicking on your site
- Hundreds of other things
The best way to get to know Google Analytics is to try it out for yourself. It’s free. It’s fast. It’s cool. What more can you ask for?
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14 Comments
Google Analytics is a great tool. It recently helped me determine which blog articles folks were reading the most. This was important since I’m putting some of my blog articles in my new book.
I especially like the fact that Google Analytics also indicates how much time visitors spend on a given page.
Thanks for sharing this free and invaluable tool.
Dr. Brown,
Thanks for the comment.
I use the “goal” function to track list sign-ups. By doing that I can see what content turns people into subscribers. That not only tells me what people are reading, but what is generating leads.
Hi Aaron,
I haven’t used the “goal” function yet. But sounds like I need to.
Thanks for pointing out to me that you use it to track sign-ups.
The simple way to set it up is to just make your “thank you for submitting” page the “goal” page. Every time someone submits an email it counts as a completed goal.
Of course you can get fancier if you wish…
I track submitted an email as well as confirmed an email. And the confirms get a monetary value so I get an idea of how much money a page or referrer or keyword is worth. I know it may sound a little extreme, but once it is set up it’s easy to follow, and it really puts your planning into perspective.
Now I need to go check my leads to see how much money ClickBank ID “florabrown” is making me…
I would be interested in learning more about the goals and how they work. I have seen them and never investigated out of intimidation of the unknown.
What can you tell us
Like Flora , I haven’t Used the goal function, but it sounds like a great idea , another skill to master. How many goal tracking codes would you use Aaron?
Thank you for reminding me i need to spend more time on amalytics
Sounds like a good mini-report.
Yes Please , a think that is a great idea, look forward to it
I never understood what a goal was in GA. Makes perfect sense now. I’ll have to start using that now. Thanks for the tip.
Hey good post
Recently started using Google Analytics but not for goals and email tracking as you described. Thanks for sharing other beneficial ways to use this tool.
A mini-report would be great.
I have used Google Analytics for some time and it is very useful to see where the traffic comes from and why. Using the site overlay feature on a site will also show you what links are being clicked - on which is great.
Google Webmaster Tools are another very important thing to learn.
Great resource for me to track the visitor from the blog. I’m appreciated if you can show me how to add the google analytic code in the blog for wordpresss and blogger blog?
Thanks
To your success
Bryan Hee
Bryan,
Go to your dashboard, then to “Design”
Then click on “Theme Editor”
Click on Footer in the right hand column
Scroll down in the footer until you can see the closing body tag:
</body>
Paste in the Google Anayltics code just above the closing body tag
Save your changes
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