Last week I gave a brief introduction into Google Analytics and hopefully you were able to setup the code yourself or get your designer to help you out. Today I am going to talk about ways to use Analytics to help out your business.

There are many ways to use Analytics to your advantage (some of them depend on your organization size), but today I will focus on a few quick examples for the small business:

Getting an overview of your website performance - In your “Dashboard” you can quickly see how many Visits, Pageviews, Average Time on Site and % of new visitors. This is very valuable information that you should be collecting on a regular basis, Analytics makes it very easy. If you don’t have any visitors to your website…obviously something needs to be updated or completely redesigned.

Traffic Sources - Under ‘Visitors’ in the left hand column you will see ‘Traffic Sources’ which contains information on where users have surfed in from. Was your site linked on a blog recently? It will show here. Are you doing some online advertising? Well you can track to see what the effectiveness is of that ad is here as well.

Content - I love using this to track specific URLs. So you want to see the effectiveness of your advertisement in the Yellow Pages is doing for your business? Is it bringing customers to your #1 marketing asset (your website)? How would you know? Have your web designer create a unique url like www.yourdomain.com/yellowpages - put this in your advertising and track users coming in from that advertisement through the ‘Content’ selector.

Visitors - This information is interesting, but I wouldn’t say it is most important to your business. I’m usually just checking if the users are new users or returning on avarage. You can run tests on what browsers people are using, and where they are surfing in from (I have someone surfing in from Romania currently), but this information isn’t as valuable as the above three (if your website was built properly).

Take a look through your Google Analytics account and start tracking your users, once you start tracking this stuff it becomes less of a chore and more of a habit. If you aren’t setting goals or tracking your website, it is highly doubtful you will be successful online. Next week I will be talking more about Business Blogging..specifically driving qualified traffic to your Business Blog. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.