Knowing the details of your website traffic is a must, especially to track the results of a marketing campaign. As a mortgage website provider, I must say that we too use this amazing tool to track our website traffic, and recommend it to our clients.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. We use this tool to see how many visitors come to our website on what days, where they came from, (if they directly typed in our website address, if they came from activerain, facebook, twitter, directory, email campaign, etc. on what date). If we send out a postcard or advertise in a magazine we can track to see if it brought in more visitors or not. If you take out a newspaper ad, create ads on craigslist, exchange links with a referral partner etc. you can see exactly how many people found your website from specific sources.
Here's a few snapshots of a client's google analytics account:
Direct Traffic - visitors that knew the website address and typed it into their address bar.
Referring Sites - other websites that had a link to your site such as activerain, linkedin, twitter etc.
Search Engines - self explanatory ~ visitors coming from searching for your website in google, yahoo, bing, etc.
From there you can see more detail of what referring sites sent visitors to you, what search engines people used to search for you, and the keywords they typed into the search engine to find you. It's helpful to know what people type in a search engine to find you so you can work on your search engine ranking for those keywords and you can get an idea of what other keywords may be important to get a better ranking on:
You can see what keywords people typed in search engines to find this client's website, and what webpages they visited within the site:
You can even see worldwide, nationally, state wide and city wide how many people visited your site over a time period!
These are just a couple things that Google Analytics shows you, you can see how very powerful this information can be for you to improve your keyword rankings, track your marketing efforts, and see what webpages people are most interested in.
Sign up here for your free Google Analytics account: http://www.google.com/analytics/
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