An introduction to website performance tracking

One of the reasons why the Internet is such a great marketing tool is measurability.

There are more metrics available through free website tracking tools than even the most marketing savvy business owner will ever need. Here are just a few things you can measure:

• How many people visited your website.
• Which visitors were new and which have been to your site before.
• Where your visitors came from.
• Which pages they visited.
• How long they spent browsing your site.

Perhaps even more importantly you can also collect and analyse specific data on the goals you have defined for your web pages. (You have defined goals for your web pages, right?)

Ok – right now I can see your eyes starting to glaze over. You’re probably thinking what could you possibly do with all this information? How will it help you to improve your bottom line?

It’s what you do with it that counts

If you’re like most business owners you’ll be painfully aware of how much it can cost to acquire a new lead or to make a sale. And if you’ve experimented with an online strategy such as Pay Per Click you’ll be even more conscious of your marketing spend.

Whatever incremental improvements and adjustments you can make to get more bang for your marketing buck will reflect well on your sales volume and profit margins.

And that, in a nutshell, is where website performance tracking (commonly called analytics) can help. It will give you a very clear, easy to understand view of the performance of your current online marketing campaign. And from this baseline you’ll be able to monitor the results of the fine tuning that you do over time.

The tool of choice for analytics

To make things very simple – there is only one analytics tool I recommend to business owners – and that is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a powerful, easy to use package that is available at a very good price – FREE!

I think you will be blown away by what this tool will do for your business.