You Don't Have to Be Analytical to Benefit from Website Analytics in Business

Whether you use Google Analytics or an onboard site statistics function on your website or blog, don't dismiss site analytics as too difficult to learn or not of real business value. If you have a business website, you already can understand and use the basic information from a website statistics resource.

Why bother? Many busy business people who know they need a website to validate their business these days do not think they have the time to study the traffic to their sites and the actions taken by site visitors. Or, they believe that it may be good stuff to know, but it doesn't bring anything to the bottom line.

If your website is online only because you know you need one but you don't expect a lot of direct business from it, then maybe you aren't interested in site traffic statistics. If, however, you would like to see business results and dollars to the bottom line from your website, then you need to learn a few basic things about your site statistics and why they are important.

Where are you getting your site visitors?

Even if you aren't spending a lot of money to have a website online, you are spending money marketing your business in print or other media. In doing so, you're probably mentioning your website and the domain name. Just knowing that someone came directly to your website from a business card or a newspaper ad is valuable information.

There's no way to see how they got to your website from other marketing. That's why a small and free strategy can make a difference. Set up other pages on the site, even if they have most of the same information. So, set up "YourBusiness.com/products" and use that address on one piece of marketing or in one media marketing venue. Now your stats will tell you if you're getting people from that one media marketing source.

What do they do while they're on your site?

What pages do your site visitors go to on your site, or what blog posts do they read? If specific pages and information are consistently more popular on your site, it can tell you what to do to get more business or what to advertise in other media. If a couple of pages on your site are getting most of your traffic (other than the homepage), maybe you should put some kind of special offer there such as a coupon to get them to walk into your store or send in a form to do business with you.

It's easy and takes little time to see what's happening on your site.

You can take an hour or so to learn how to access your site statistics/analytics, and then spend less than an hour each month to gain valuable information about your visitors. You'll be glad you did.