Google Analytics

Are you regularly checking your site's statistics using Google Analytics? Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool with many reports that make is easy to monitor the performance of your website.

Once you have Google Analytics (GA) connected to your website, it silently collects a wealth of data from every person visiting. The information is stored and collated, allowing you to easily assess your website performance over a period.

• You can review a range of useful statistics, including:
• How many visitors did you have?
• How did they find you (e.g. search)?
• What keywords did they use?
• How many pages did they view?
• How long did they stay?
• What percentage of them reached a goal (i.e. requested a quote or purchased something)?

I suggest reviewing your statistics at least monthly. You may want to add these items to your dashboard (scroll down to Getting Started).

Show Me the Money

The real money makers for most commercial sites are the number of visitors and the percentage that reach a goal. The formula for your site return is:

$Profit = #Visitors * %Conversion * $AvgProfitPerAction

This means you can increase your profits by:

• Gaining more Visitors
• Increasing Conversion rate
• Increasing Average profit per action.

I will cover how you can improve each of these in later articles. It all begins by connecting Google Analytics.

Beware Short Term Fluctuations

Just like one flower doesn't make a spring, one day without visitors or conversions isn't necessarily the start of a sales downturn. There are many seasonal and short-term factors that influence site traffic including:

• Weekends
• Public holidays
• Recent news
• Plain old luck.

Don't panic if your sales seem to go down for a few days. It may just be a confluence of seasonal factors and luck. Try viewing your data averaged weekly or monthly to see how it compares in the long term . 

Other Resources

If you are eager to learn more, my favorite two blogs on Google Analytics are:

• The Official Google analytics Blog often is the first place you will hear of new features and runs introductory articles.
• Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik full of advanced tips on gaining insight into behaviour.