Google offers tons of free tools to do all kinds of things like create online spreadsheets, find directions to a local restaurant, manage your photo collection, or share a family calendar. Whether you have an established web presence or are looking to launch your first site, there is one free tool from Google that everyone should be using. That wonderful tool is called Google Analytics.
Google Analytics provides very detailed insight into how people are interacting with your website. By just placing a small piece of code within each page of your site you will start receiving answers to questions like:
- How many people visited my site during the last month?
- What state (or country) do most of my visitors come from?
- What search terms do my visitors use to find my site?
- Is my site getting any traffic from social networks? If so, which ones?
But answering these questions is just the tip of the iceberg. With some understanding of what your trying to accomplish with your web site there are a number of ways to dive deeper into these numbers and glean valuable information about just how effective your web presence might be. (more…)
