Web Analytics
Web Analytics software enables you to monitor in detail how traffic finds its way to your site, how people use your site when they get to it and whether they are doing what you want them to do!
Integrating your site with a web analytics package, such as Google Analytics, can help you measure the success of your marketing campaigns, help you identify weak points in your site design and help you refine your marketing messages. A good Web Analytics package and an understanding of the metrics it records are critical to the success of any online activity.
Why is it important to analyse traffic?
Websites are generally set up for a purpose! It may be that you want to raise awareness of an issue, sell your products online or even earn advertising revenue from your site using banner adverts or Google Adsense. Whatever your goals if you don't know who is looking at your site, how people find you and what they do when they get there it's very hard to know how effective your site is in achieving your objectives and whether your online marketing strategy is working.
How can an Analytics package help?
An analytics package enables you to track a whole range of information about your website. For smaller organisations there can be so much information it can be a little overwhelming at first! There are however a number of key statistics (or "metrics" as they are often referred to) that can provide valuable insight into how your site is doing.
Patterns of usage change as you create new content, rework your site design or launch new marketing initiatives - an important feature of an Analytics package is therefore that it also enables you to track how your site is performing over time. For example if you start an advertising campaign on Google Adwords you can see the effect on key statistics and refine your campaigns to improve your sites effectiveness over time.
