Knowing your visitors is very important. Knowing what your visitors do, in what order, which pages are the most popular, or even, where are your visitors from, is extremely valuable information. It helps you to rearrange the content, find out what your visitors need, and improve the overall experience on your website. Getting visitor feedback however is very difficult. I doubt that visitors will answer any questioner that you will have on your site and questioners are not very reliable anyway. You can relax though because there is an excellent and absolutely free tool that you can use to find everything that you ever wanted about your visitors and their behavior when they are navigating your website. Google Analytics.
Setup your account
Setting up Google Analytics for your website is free and easy. All you need is a Google account which is free as well. After you login to Google Analytics account you provide the required information about your website (account name, url
of your website, etc.) and Google gives you a small javascript code that you put in the HTML code of your pages. It is that simple. This little piece of code takes care of everything. This script will start gathering information about all the visits in your website and present them to you in your account. Please keep in mind that data will start rolling after a day of setting up the account, but from then onwards they roll daily!
Get those valuable numbers
Google Analytics is truly impressive in the amount of valuable information that can provide to you. It is quality and quantity bundled together. Everything is presented in a coherent fashion so you know exactly what is it that you are looking at. All the options are available to you from a side menu that is always visible and ready to reveal even more options and information. However you will never feel lost as everything is clearly identified.
Now lets see some of the information that is available to you from Google Analytics.
Number of unique visitors.
Number of visits.
Average time on website.
Page views(Total).
Pages views(Individual, see which pages are most popular).
From what page do your visitors tend to stop viewing your site.
How users navigate while in your site(what page they view first, what link the click next,etc.).
Where are your visitors from (down to which city).
What Browser/Operating system they use.
And the list goes on. The sheer amount of information will keep you occupied for long and everyday you will discover something new.
Use the numbers
It is essential to translate this information to website management decisions. Only you can do that because you know your website and you know what you want from your visitors. Now that you know what your visitors need you can direct them to what you want. For example, if you have a page that you want them to do something(click on a download,picture etc.) but they tend to click on something else you can view that from Google Analytics and then change the arrangement of the components/links on screen to make, what you want them to do, more obvious in order for them to do it. It is very easy to view design errors since you will see what your users tend to do and if it is a mistake, you rearrange what you need to make it easier for them to find what they want. This is very important because if your visitors find what they want they will come back, they will stay in your website longer and they 'll tell their friends. That is more traffic for your website.
If, for example, the average time on site is very low that probably means that there is something wrong with the site home page. It is not appealing enough or they do not spot what they are looking for right away. This is very important knowledge to have. Another example of how you can use Google analytics to improve your site is content analysis. You can view which pages are the most popular and create more content similar to that. This way your visitors will find even more information that they want on your site and stay longer.
Knowledge is power
Google Analytics provides you with valuable information about your website for free. You can use this knowledge to improve your website in so many ways; design, content, structure etc. Improving your website means more happy visitors which means more traffic for you. It will be your most trusted friend for your website's management.
