Want to measure your inbound web site traffic from all sources?  A very common mistake that web masters make is to only insert the Google Analytics page on the web site’s home page…. This will ONLY measure the inbound traffic to the home page, not your entire web site.

Install your Google Analytics on each and every page that you wish to measure and you’ll start to get the big picture as to how visitors are behaving, which keywords bounce more than others, etc.  The Analytics code should be installed directly above the </body> tag for optimal results.

Don’t forget to install Analytics in your blog, e-commerce store, etc.!

Being technical geeks and analytical geeks, we digest a great deal of information on any given day from our client’s Google Analytics reports.  These reports give us a great deal of valuable information that we in turn use to help improve not only search engine rankings, but web site usability.

One of the many variables measured in Google Analytics is the web site visitor’s average time on the web site.  We pay attention to this because if people are only sticking around for 2 seconds there are clearly some issues with either the web site itself, or the marketing that drove that web site visitor to the web site in the first place.  For example, if a searcher types in Orlando Widget and lands on a web site that sells Mortgages, it does not compute to the visitor: they leave and continue their search.  On the other hand, if the visitor had typed in Orlando Mortgage and lands on your Orlando Mortgage web site AND your web site is UGLY and does not instill confidence, the average time on site will clearly suffer as your web site visitor has run for the hills.

We typically see an average of about a 2 minute web site visit: if we start seeing a 15 minute web site visit, we start raising our eye brows… Sometimes you have hackers that are looking for vulnerabilities, etc that will stick around on a web site.  The bottom line here: analyzing your analytics can give you a great snapshot as to whats happening or more importantly, Whats NOT happening on your web site.

For those of you who use Google’s free tracking software : Google Analytics, you may wish to poke around in their a bit.

Google has a free goal tracking built right into the analytics software: let’s say that you want to know where your leads are coming from and further, what pages they traversed to get to your end goal: whether it’s a sale, contact form, or lead inquiry, you can set your Google Analytics to track conversions:

Here’s how to set it up:
Log Into Your Google Account:
Click My Account
Click Analytics
Choose your account, if you have multiple sites being tracked
Click Edit
You will then see a listing of empty goals
Enter your goal information : i.e., let’s say that when people fill out your online form, they get sent to a thanks.html page, you would enter that information in here.

It does take about 24 hours to start generating information, I recommend sending a test web conversion through to make certain that it is tracking.