How can I monitor activity on my website?

So you created a website.  Great!  But do you know how it's performing?  Do you know which content is effective, and which isn't?  Do you know where people are entering your site and where they are leaving?

This is where a program like Google Analytics comes in.  How do you use Google Analytics?  Well, you insert a bit of code into your website code, and Google extracts all kinds of useful information from your site to help you continue to monitor and improve its performance.

What kind of information, you ask?  Well it tells you things like:

• Which pages people viewed the most, and what specific information on each page was interesting to them. 
  
• How they found your website.  For example, did they find it via a search engine?  By typing in the URL directly?  Or by linking from a different site or location (what we call inbound marketing)? 
  
• How people navigated through your site.  In other words, what pages they visited when they got there, and how they moved from page to page.
• How long people spent on your site, and how quickly they left (what we call bounce rate).
• How many new versus returning visitors you had.
• What keywords were used to find your site in searches.
  
• Lots and lots of other useful information that is in both a graphical and numeric format.

So why is all this important, you ask?  Well...if you can't monitor how people are finding and using your site, you can't make it more effective.  Marketing consultants and communications people know how to use this data effectively to continuously monitor and improve their websites.  This is why finding the right person to design your site content and flow is so important, and learning how to interpret the information is so essential for your business.

Need help growing your business or nonprofit organization?  Browse my website to learn about how I can help you with your particular needs.