One of the biggest advantages of the Internet is that all interactions are measurable.  As a website owner, website analytics is one of the most important tools in operating a successful business. The focus of the workshop will be directed towards using Google Analytics.  This is a free website analytics package that can be installed with ease into any existing website. Throughout this document you will notice a term called a ‘conversion’.  A conversion can be simply though as an action that results in a sale, using a contact form, signing up for the monthly newsletter or even completing an online reservation form.

The Importance of Website Analytics

• What day a visitor came to your website
• How long they stayed on your site
• What pages they visited
• The geographical location of that visitor
• How long they stayed on each individual page
• What page the customer left your site from
• What source they came from or found your website through
• Keywords they may have used to find you in the search engines
• How many times a particular visitor returned to your website

The Three Main aspects of Website Analytics

Traffic Sources

You can study each individual source of traffic to see how well it is converting. With this information you can identify the type of search phrase or link that sends the most valuable customers to your site. Then you can put your SEO efforts into getting more of this valuable traffic from similar areas.

Site Behaviour

By tracking the progress of visitors at your website you can learn some very useful information. If you study the data on how long visitors stay on certain landing pages and how well different sales pages convert, you can make improvements to your site. By changing the under-performing pages to be more like the most effective ones, you can significantly increase your overall conversion rate.

Online Marketing

Using Website Analytics you can look into other forms of online marketing to assess their effectiveness.  You can track the number of visitors from a specific advert that go on to make a conversion at your site. This information will tell you if the advert is worth the cost you are paying. It will also allow you to make accurate predictions about how you should change your advertising budget, and how those changes would affect profit levels.
Other forms of marketing such as email campaigns and pay-per-click advertising can also be tracked so you can continually improve your marketing efforts to make them more profitable.