Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Analyzing Your Website Traffic with Google

Lots of companies have websites these days. Your company probably has one. These commercial websites have lots of functions, and they can range from simple information sites about a company to ones more like ours, which are full e-commerce sites that sell products online. No matter what the primary function of the website is, it’s important to know your customers and know how effective your website is.

We’ve been using a very cool product from Google called Google Analytics which provides lots of tools for checking website performance. There’s a lot more to website traffic than counting hits. Google analytics tells us how many of our visitors are first time customers, and how many are returning customers. We can check which days of the week are busiest on our site, and which sections of the site are most effective. Other convenient features check which browsers our customers tend to use and what screen resolutions they’re seeing. If you’re wondering how customers are getting to your website, Google Analytics can see if they’re visiting from search engine results, direct URL, or other sources. You can also compress or stretch the analysis timeframe to see how your website is progressing in the long run.

One of the newer sections of our website sells Milwaukee Tool Parts and we were able to track and analyze the traffic to the page right away. Conversion rates, which show the percentage of visitors that actually place an order online, are important to keep an eye on and we’re able to check how effectively this new section of the website can sell tool parts to customers.

It’s a pretty simple thing, but Google Analytics has provided us with lots of very important information regarding our business online. I would recommend it to any business owner who is serious about their online presence.

Posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under eReplacement Parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.