Starting a Business | SEO & Google

Website Analytics

Without knowing how you're performing now, you've no way of knowing if any of your changes make a blind bit of difference.

The sign up

Google Analytics is a popular service. So popular, in fact, it can take a few weeks for you to be approved after signing up. Bear this in mind and start the sign-up process as soon as you can. Once you are approved, you will be issued with a small bit of code, which will need to be added to every page of your site that you want to track - for most of us, this means every page. Your user name and password will allow you access to a whole host of statistics regarding your site.

In a nutshell

So, what's it all about? Well, Analytics is a great way to check visually what's going on in terms of traffic on your site - how many people are visiting, what they're looking at, how long they stay and the city or town from where they are visiting you. Not bad, for free. With the data you are then able to set targets and goals for the performance of the site, and this data is collected and presented to you through an easy to use graphical interface. If you are using, or plan to use, paid-for adverts through Google (AdWords) then it makes sense to sign up as the two programs are so interrelated and in a way interdependent.

Other benefits?

Again, Google make no mention of it, but I can't help feeling that having some Google code on your site is a pretty good indication of how important you feel Google is to your site. Therefore, I can't help feeling that - unofficially - your loyalty and acceptance of Google does not go unnoticed and unrewarded in terms of how often your site is visited by the Googlebot, and subsequently ranked...

Its word is law...

Actually it's not, and at the end of the day Google is a business looking to make profit, so, whilst at the moment the Analytics program works really well it should always be used in conjunction with your own stats package (usually standard with most websites now). It is interesting to compare and contrast the data from both sources - they should, of course, be telling you the same thing, but that is not always the case.

Here's an idea for you

Pop over to www.google.com/analytics and sign up. Once you receive approval add (or have your developer add) the 'urchin' code to your web pages, and within 24 hours you'll be receiving accurate data about activity on your site. (Repeat the process for each and every domain name/site you own.) You can track as many separate domains through one Analytics account as you wish.


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