For any small business, a successful website is the key to expanding your success. A successful website is a busy website: visitors stopping by, commenting on it, talking about it and maybe even purchasing from it. But how do you get visitors and do you know if they are your target audience? There’s more in depth questions such as, “How do users find my website? Do they use the ads I bought or are they finding me through a search engine? What keywords do they type in?” You can answer all of your questions by using analytics.

Web analytics are an excellent platform for measuring the activity on your website.

You can find out where your visitors log in from, such as America or Europe; how long they stay on your site and if they clicked on the advertisement banners you paid for. A great analytic tool to start off with is Google Analytics; it is widely used because of its features and happily, it is free too.

Getting started with Google Analytics is simple. You begin by reading their getting started guide and filling out a website checklist.  The checklist applies to your business website and asks you to do a couple of things, such as install a visitor tracking code and create keywords for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The checklist is a valuable process in itself since it simplifies some key steps you need to take in order to receive data on your website and then analyze it.

Prior to beginning this process, it would help to ask yourself a few essential questions about your business. Yes, you did start your own business or you have been running it for a while but sometimes, a business’ priorities change as it expands and clients can also change. After you find out the keywords that essentially describe your services and your clients, putting those keywords to work on your checklist with the tracking services (they are also called cookies for a nicer ring), analyzing your website activity will seem less daunting and more of a fun exploration.

After completing the checklist, Google Analytics offers extra guides and tutorials. You can take a free online course and once you pass you receive an industry-recognized qualification. There are also training seminars available ranging from Intro to Advanced levels.