You’re ready to launch your website and have the world beat a path to your door. But how will you know if any visitors show up? Maybe you’ve been advertising your site but not getting many orders and wonder why. Or you just changed your homepage and aren’t sure of the impact. What can you do in each of these situations?

Answer: use your web analytics software to gain insight into what’s happening with your website. Simple enough… but wait… you’re using web analytics for your website right? Okay, so maybe you aren’t using web analytics software and don’t even understand what it is or why it’s important.

Let’s first explain what web analytics is with a simple analogy. Think how hard it would be to drive a car if you had no dashboad. That’s right. No speedometer, gas gauge, warning lights, etc. Sure you could still drive but… you get the idea!

So consider web analytics the dashboard for your website. And though the phrase “web analytics” sounds complicated it’s really not. I mean it can be if you have a complex website with thousands of pages. But that’s probably not the case here. Instead, just realize that web analytics represents a set of online reports (again, dashboard) which can help you understand the following:

• How many visitors came to my site?
• Where did these visitors come from?
• How long did they stay?
• What did they do while on my site?

This is important data if you want to get your arms around how your website is performing.

Now let’s talk about where you can get web analytics for your site. If you do a search for “web analytics software” you’ll discover there are lots of choices. We’ll make it easy. Go with Google Analytics. It’s not only first class web analytics software but it’s also free of charge!

Having said that, you still need to get Google Analytics installed on your website. This is fairly easy if you’re familiar with HTML. Otherwise, my advice is to have someone else do it for you. Usually the technical folks where you’re hosting your site can help. Google itself also lists authorized vendors who can lend a hand. And expect to pay a couple hundred dollars to get it going but it can cost more to set up if you want all the bells and whistles the software has to offer.

In any case, you should be up and running (and reviewing charts) within a day or so. And once you start seeing the online reports… you’ll wonder how your website lived without them!