When setting up your website, you had some goals – to communicate your company's expertise, to get more leads or even to do more business. Using web analytics to track your visitors helps you understand who they are and how you can better meet their needs.

Tracking and using visitor data

The earliest web analytics simply included data on the number of visitors and page views. But, this is not enough to take decisions. Today, you can track many other details such as:

• How much time did visitors spend on different pages?
• What keywords did they search for when they found your site on a search engine?
• From which countries are they visiting? From which sites are you getting referrals?
• People who clicked on a particular link such as a 'sign up' or a 'buy' link.
• Conversion rates – the number of people who arrived at your home page who subsequently bought something.

Such data helps you plan your content better and develop more focused marketing strategies. For example, if most people are looking at the registration details page but not signing up, the content may not be inspiring or relevant.

Back to top

Tools to use

There are many free and paid analytics tools in the market. For most users, free tools are sufficient to begin with. Large sites with high volume transactions need a more robust, paid tool or even web analytics consultants to make meaning out of data.

For smaller users, however, Google Analytics is a popular option. It is free, has a very easy user interface and can be integrated with Google Adwords, if you are advertising on Google. For blogs, other free tools such as StatCounter and SiteMeter are also good options, with the latter offering a paid service for blogs with a larger volume of visitors.

Sometimes, you may not even have to install any of these. If a shared hosting company hosts your site, an analytics package such as AWStats and Webalizer may be already built-in. The free versions may not offer data in-depth, but suit smaller sites that simply want an overview.

Back to top

Working with data

Web Analytics is not just about getting the data. First of all, it is important to have someone who is comfortable with reading and interpreting the data. If there is no capable in-house resource, consider outsourcing the service for a small fee. Keep your goals in mind or specific questions you have at that point of time and look for data that helps you make decisions. Ultimately, the data is as good as the action it drives!

Back to top