If you’re not capturing and measuring your web site’s performance it’s costing you money!
Why do I make such a bold statement? The reason is simple… why do you have a website? – To get more business of course! (Presumably this would be the answer for 99% of corporate website owners). The next question is … how are can you get more business from your website? – One of the answers to this question is by capturing your web site’s usage statistics. But that would cost a lot of money or be a huge amount of work you say! So how does one set about to capture website statistical data and measure a web site’s performance? Well there is an easy and best of all it’s FREE! It’s called Google Analytics. Google is one of those wonderful free killer apps from the good folks over at Google. Setting up Google Analytics on your website requires three things: a) Register for a Google Account (you can use any existing email account) b) Sign-up for Google Analytics c) load the a few lines (the Google Analytics tracking code supplied by Google) code to the bottom of every page on your website. See below for an example. Sit back and watch the statistics accumulate! I will delve deeper in the setup and usage of Google Analytics in future blog posts.
The snippet of code to be added just before the </body> tag on each page of your website.
Note: You must get this code from Google Analytics as they will assign you an account number when you sign up.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(“<script src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’></script>” );
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(‘UA-9999999-1);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>