If you are not using Google Analytics, I have one question for you? Why not? For any aspiring webmaster, Google's free traffic monitoring and analysis service is an awesome tool that has now become my first port of call every day. Google Analytics keeps my finger on the pulse of my website, by tracking visitors, page views, referral sources and conversions all in one single interface.



Perhaps, you were unaware that Analytics was available. Well you will find it at http://www.google.com/analytics or if you already have a Google Adwords account, take a look at the tabs at the top of your screen and you'll see that you can access Analytics there too. Go take a look and get yourself a free account.

Setting it up is pretty easy. There are two bits of code which Analytics will generate automatically for you. One is the tracker code, which simply needs to be copied and pasted to the pages of your website. Some webmasters only put the code on their main pages, but I'd recommend putting it on every single page ? that way your stats will be much more in depth.

The other code is for Conversion tracking, which I'll cover in a minute.

So now you have it set up, let me tell you the three reason why I absolutely love Analytics.

Reason #1 ? it's incredibly comprehensive. Analytics will tell you how many visitors came to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they looked at, which site they came from, what kind of browser they had, what country they live in and whether they have been before.

It will tell you which keywords, campaigns and ad versions brought them here. It will tell you how long they stayed on each page, which page they looked at before and which one they went to next. It will tell you which page they came in on and which one they left from. You can look at the site as a whole, or each individual page and you can analyse whole months or just a single day.

In fact, at times there is almost too much data, so I tend to focus on my key metrics. Number of unique visitors, top pages and most importantly the traffic source. For example I know exactly how many visitors are brought in by my pay-per-click campaign and how many come from my article writing efforts. This is powerful because it allows me to directly measure my free of charge traffic building activity against my paid advertising.

Reason #2 ? Conversion tracking. The second piece of code that Analytics will generate is a conversion tracker. This is copied and pasted to whichever page or pages in your site mean that you have a made a sale. I use it for my newsletter sign-ups, by putting the code on the Thank you page.

Once a vistor arrives there, Analytics will record the visit and allow me to cross reference against other statistics.

For example, I know that visitors who find my site in a standard web search and click on the link, are almost twice as likely to sign up for the newsletter as those who come from an Adwords ad. So, you can see why free traffic is so valuable. Not only does it cost nothing but it is better quality too.

Reason #3 - Last but by no means least, Analytics lets me test and tweak to my heart's content. Having such comprehensive data at my fingertips, means that I can see the effect of any change to my site, the very next day.

If I change my home page, I can soon see the effect on my conversions and watch whether visitors now navigate down a different route. I can see if they spend more, or less time reading my new content and I can see what it makes them do afterwards.

No matter what tweaks I make, the results are rapidly available to me and if things go wrong and traffic or conversions fall, I can see immediately what needs to be done.

Back to my original question. If you're not using Google Analytics on your site. Why Not?