When you have a website, you have already been instructed about the things you need to do. For example, you know to update your website from time-to-time to keep it alive with fresh and current content. Search engines will like your site because of this.
Updating your website without knowledge of the visits that you are getting may mean you are doing the wrong things. It would be like adding various pieces of software to improve the performance of your computer without your ever turning on the computer to see how it runs.
WebCubic always recommends to our website clients that they use Google Analytics on their website. It’s free. It provides comprehensive information. Is it the best analytics tool available? No. Can you monitor and manage your website usefulness? Absolutely!
We feel strongly enough about using analytics that we advise all of our template website users to use it. In the case of all custom website users, we install it for them. The installation process is not difficult. Here is a simple overview of what you need to do.
1) If you have a (Google) gmail account, go to setp 2. Otherwise setup a gmail account for yourself at www.gmail.com.
2) Go to Google analytics at www.google.com/analytics and create an account.
3) Part of the setup will be to specify the domain name of your website. Google analytics will generate installation code for you. Copy that small bit of code and paste it into each page of your website.
NOTE: if you are using a template website (like WebCubic’s real estate websites) then you may not have access to every page to install the generated code. You should be able to install it, at least, on the home page. Your analytics results will be limited but you will still get meaningful information.
That’s it.
The way that Google analytics works is that today’s statistics will not be available until the following day.
In another post, we’ll explain what to look for from the statistics that are collected and reported by the analytics.
In the meantime, it should be obvious that you will need to collect days and days of data before you can reach any conclusions about the statistics. Regardless of the visitors that you get, you should let at least fifteen days go by before you “analyze” the data. Anything before that may be statistical anomolies.