The Newbie 101 Site Analytics Guide Tools Techniques Information

Why should site owners run analytics on their website's? All website owners should run analytics on their website's to gather sophisticated reports about activity of traffic on your website. Analytics can easily run on any website, and once it is set up it will begin to collect information that will help you plan for your website's future. The statistics you gather will help you later target your website's strong and weak points, and help you decide which keywords are successful, and which are not. Having this analytic information can strongly impact your advertising campaigns in a positive way. This ultimately will happen when you become better informed about your own web site by running analytics. The analytic program I highly suggest to all of my visitors is the free Google Analytics tool. Actually I really think people need to acknowledge that Google Analytics is the best and easiest to use FREE analytics tool for anyone that has under 5 million page views a month or runs adwords campaigns through Google Adwords. If you are a member of the Google Adwords program then not only is the analytics free but you are given unlimited page view tracking. In addition, Google Analytics is completely integrated into the AdWords front-end and with your AdWords campaign, making it easy to track your AdWords ROI.Google Analytics is the only product that can automatically provide AdWords ROI metrics, without you having to import cost data or add tracking information to keywords.

How does it work? It collects and organizes data using statistical analysis in order to find, review and understand web page visitor patterns. We use this information to predict and improve website future performance.

Must I use Google Analytics? A website owner knows how important Google can be to their website's, but sometimes we have to go elsewhere for our solutions. There are several other free analytic scripts you can attach to your website's. Having more then one analytic source can help you compare the differences and tally up the average scores between the multiple results. If you have PHP, and MySQL options on your server then consider using PHPMyVisites along with Google's free analytic program. The heat map and Site overlay options in these add-ons are very nice to have available when gathering up your analytic information.

I Set Up Analytics Now What? Collecting the Data

You now have a site with quality specialized content and Analytics is running so now what? First make sure that the analytic code is working. You can do this by asking some friends to visit your website, and to surf it. Ask them to visit it again the next day, and you should later see this traffic data in your analytics. The next thing you must do is save a complete backup of your website. It is very important that you have backups of your website before you make any changes to it. Why would you want to have these backups? If a change you made had a negative effect on your website, you would then want to revert your website back to the state when it was proving positive results.

Now that you are sure the analytics script is working, it is time to do some data crunching on your sites traffic as to how your visitors surf the site. For now just let the analytics program gather up the data, and be patient because the more data you collect, the more you will have to analyze later. It is very important (actually critical) that you are collecting truthful data and of course you do not want the statistics to track or to count your own visits either. You can use the analytics program settings to have it ignore visits from your IP.

Do not panic if you do not see much of any traffic at first as this is very common. I would suggest you spend more time on making your site content more appealing and marketing the site. If after a few weeks you do not see any traffic at all then something could be wrong and you may need to evaluate the hosts and website for issues.

The goal is to collect a months worth of traffic data and use that data so that you can better optimize your site. I would not be so quick to make crazy changes until you have the data and tools to see how you're doing in the Search Engine Result Pages either. The analytics and SERPS will play a major role for you during the life of your website, so this is the time to get organized and understand the information on your website analytics reports. You will make changes according to analytic data you receive, and if you did your homework, you will see that the changes proved positive. Run your next analytic crunch, but this time you will have more experience and can make even better decisions this time around. The same goes for negative results. Do not panic if a change you made caused a negative reaction. Simply go and revert the changes back to what you had earlier and try again.

HINT: Do not try to spam (beg) for visitors. If you are a new site don't be ashamed of mentioning your website, but only do this at the right time. If the site is new then the best bet is to let visitors know you are new and give your website a chance naturally. Never lie about your sites age or the traffic it gets, because this information is available to the public. Take your time, and gain popularity in the community at a nice pace, and never say something that you cannot back up or verify later. Good Luck, and if this information has helped you I sure would love to know about it.

Your Visitors Privacy? It is Statistical Information Only

I am worried as I think this invades my visitors privacy? No, not a chance! Analytics will not collect information that is super private, and you are not invading their privacy. You are a business website owner that is only collecting data on where the traffic went on your website. You do not have anyones names, address, phone numbers, social security numbers and more. NO, you simply are seeing traffic, and what that traffic is doing on your website.

It does not collect personal information! While this all may sound so strange to our new website owners, it is very common for our seasoned site owners to know this information collected is strictly for collecting information on the sites activity. I would go so far as to agree and say that tracking spiders is just as important as tracking your visitors. I say this because in reality it is not collecting personal information in the normal sense, but it collects information on the activity within your website. It is a safe and effective way to properly manage your website, and any future plans you have for the site.

What about those changes recently? Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. Knowing this information about the visitors can truly help you design a website model along the lines of income and expenses. Again, it will not collect personal information on your visitors, but it will help you collect enough data to know what is going on with your website so that you can plan accordingly.

Best Wishes!