Photographer: jscreationzs (from www.freedigitalphotos.net)

If your small business website activity isn’t being tracked somehow, you’re flying blind. The easiest way to tack your website’s activity (or just a plain great way to get started in understanding website analytics) is to hook up your site to Google Analytics.

It’s free and easy. Via your Gmail account you can get started. Or just go to the Google Analytics main page. Just follow the directions and you’ll be up and running in no time. If you need help adding the code to your homepage, just ask your web developer to help.

Here’s a great example for why using it is so important. A client’s site had a good week in traffic. We knew another prominent website picked up one of the blog posts from the week. So, the natural assumption was that this link from a big-company website increased traffic, right?

Wrong. I looked at the “Popular Content” info — and there was the reason for the spike in traffic. A post about a specific offer (and related posts about the topic) spurred the big increase. Not the big link from the big website.

So without data like that, you never know what’s really driving traffic on your site.

This entry was posted on October 4, 2010 at 12:34 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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