Using Google Analytics to evaluate your website traffic

When you sign up for a Google account, you get free access to some powerful tools, one of which is Google Analytics.

To sign up for Google Analytics, click My Account, where you’ll be taken to a page listing the services you’re signed up for and those you’re not.

Click on Analytics and follow the registration wizard. At some point, you will be given a code snippet that needs to be pasted onto your website. Google Analytics then checks that code, and once it finds it, there’s a little green check to say all is well. If you are evaluating traffic from a Blog, various Blog platforms have ‘plugins’ that allow you to paste the code and then place it in the correct place on your Blog page.

If you have a company-provided website, check your ‘back office’ to see if pasting the code is possible. This is then automatically incorporated into your replicated site. You will need to check Google Analytics again to see if you get the ‘green tick’.

Otherwise, you’ll need to contact the person who designed your website (if they didn’t) and ask them to enter the code.

Once you have obtained the ‘green tick’, you will be able to visit the Google Analytics Control Panel. Here you will get a very useful overview as follows:

• Visits in the last month by day in the form of a graph
• Site usage: visits, pageviews, pages/visits
• Bounce Rate: Calculated as: Total number of people viewing a page / Total number of visits as a %
• Average Time on Site
• Visitor overview that allows you to drill down into things like visitor language, browsers used, and other information
• traffic sources
• Map Overlay – A map of the world showing where the highest concentration of your visits are coming from
• Content overview showing which pages are visited

All of this information can help you understand where your top visitors are coming from in the world, what other sites people are being referred from, the volume of visitors, how much time people are spending on your website.

So my advice is if you can use Google Analytics on your website go for it, it’s free and it gives you an incredible depth of information.