Google Analytics - Have you signed up yet?

I urge anyone who has not yet signed up for a Google Analytics account to do so immediately. It could be the wisest decision you ever make for your web site. If your web presence is important to you or your company, there's no reason you should be operating it blindly. Powerful web statistics and tracking software lets you know exactly how visitors are finding you, along with their habits once they're on your site.

Google Analytics does more than just count the number of visitors like some stats programs do. The total number of hits is not nearly as important as other data such as:

Referrals:

How are your visitors finding you? You can see exactly what keywords people search for when they find your site from search engines. Do you advertise on other sites? If so, you can easily see how much traffic those ads are sending you.

Funnels & Goals:

Track the progress of visitors to your contact or signup pages. Getting a contact form submission is great, but knowing what route the person took to get there is important too. Create funnels to track the different ways people get to your important contact pages.

By defining steps in a funnel you can track how effective your advertising efforts are at various other sites and alter your plan accordingly. This can result in a major boost to your ROI. If a higher percentage of visitors sign up or contact you from your ad on Site A than an ad on Site B, it's telling you that Site A is sending more qualified (or "relevant") visitors.

Entrance & Exit page:

Google Analytics also tells you what pages visitors land on and leave from. If visitors are leaving from a page that is the 2nd step of a 3-step signup process, you need to know that and adjust your content or navigation process accordingly to maximize signups.

In our own case here at FreshPromo, we get a large amount of clicks daily on the 301 redirect instructions page. The vast majority of users who find that page do not surf through the rest of the site, presumably because they quickly found the free information they were looking for. By integrating Google AdSense on this page, we are monetizing that exit page. Most visitors are going to leave anyway, so why not get them to leave by clicking an ad?

Information is power when you manage the promotion of a web site and the tools that Google Analytics offers are seemingly endless.