Google Analytics, or any other tool that measures yoru website’s performance, are vital for success in search engine optimisation:

• Go to Google Analytics and log in with your Google account. In the dashboard you can see a weekly or monthly overview, or any date range you choose.

• In the site usage area you can see the number of visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate (when a visitor didn’t look at any other page, just the landing page), the average time on the website and the percentage of new visits. Anyway you can choose the period of time you want to check clicking just above the graphic.

• You can also check the traffic sources overview (if they come from search engines, direct traffic or referring sites).

• In Visitors section (left menu) you can also check visitor trending, location, browsers they used, language or loyalty.

• Clicking on absolute unique visitors you can check how many people have visited the website.

• In Traffic Sources – Keywords (left menu) you can check which keywords people have been searching for to get to your website.

However, Google Analytics do not limit themselves only on the above. If you are looking to learn more about this amazing free online tracking tool, visit: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity

Google offers a great free tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special code to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

Content Analysis

Visitors Analysis

Traffic Sources

Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets (as described below) which will enable you to compare the results over time.

Specifically, you should keep an eye on these data:

Visits

Page Views

Pages/Visit

Average Time on Site

Bounce Rate – how many people left immediately after they came to the page

% New Visits

Google Page Rank – you can see this on you Google Toolbar

Goal Conversions Total

Keywords – what keywords were our website visitors looking for?

Traffic Sources – where did visitors came from?

However, the ultimate statistics talk about the VALUE all your website optimization efforts and online advertising have brought to your company.

To apply goals and tracking in online marketing, you first need to gather some data upfront, so that you will be able to estimate the value your your website is delivering every month:

• Average Sales Value – What is the value of an average sale?
• No. of Products Avg. Client Buys – How many products does an average client buy in their lifetime?
• Sales Conversion Ratio (%) – What percentage of leads will turn into sales?

When you get these data right, it is then easy, with all the online tracking tools available, to measure the real value your website is delivering every month. We recommend to measure the initial state before you start any optimisation work – since then you will be able to say how much your marketing activities have delivered.

Again, it might be worthwhile to confirm we are on the same page re these definitions:

• Absolute Unique Visitors – How many people visited your website in a particular month
• Visitors from Non-paid Search - How many people came to your website from organic non-paid search in Google
• Visitors from Google Adwords – How many people came to your website from Google Adwords
• Online Leads (Enquiries) - How many people contacted you through the website
• Estimated Lifetime Sales – How much lifetime sales did your website generate, based on your average sales value and no. of products an average customer buys in their lifetime
• Cost of Online Marketing – How much did you spend on online marketing
• Estimated Gross Profit – What remains in your pocket after you deduct Cost of Online Marketing from Estimated Lifetime Sales

Since not all leads come through the website forms, it is probably a good idea to track all incoming calls and other leads. To get the most value from your tracking, we recommend using a simple call sheet which will track all incoming calls.