By Avant Media, Inc.

05/23/2010 One of the first ques­tions that I hear from peo­ple that have just launched a site is, “How do I keep up with who is view­ing my site and how many hits I am get­ting?” My answer to them is Google Ana­lyt­ics.

What is Google Ana­lyt­ics? Google Ana­lyt­ics is a free ser­vice pro­vided by Google to allow web­site own­ers to veiw sta­tis­tics about their web­site. The inter­face is fairly intu­itive and presents you with easy to read graphs about your web traf­fic. Some of it’s more advanced fea­tures allows you to set up goals, alerts, and view the ori­gin of your site vis­its.

Google Ana­lyt­ics has a fea­ture known as “Goals”. This is a great tool that enables you to setup cer­tain goals which can range from page vis­its to a cus­tomer actu­ally buy­ing a prod­uct on your site. Here is a great arti­cle writ­ten by David Sparks at Six Revi­sions. It explains how to use “Goals” and goes into more specifics about how it works.

The “Alerts” fea­ture is part of Google Ana­lyt­ics’ new “Intel­li­gence” fea­ture which is in the Beta stage right now. “Alerts” can be setup to email you when a cer­tain page on your site is vis­ited a set num­ber of times to noti­fy­ing you when your site has received a visit from a cer­tain loca­tion. This fea­ture along with “Goals” can be quite handy when launch­ing any type of ad cam­paign and enables you to see it’s effects and make changes as needed.

Would you like to know where your traf­fic is com­ing from? “Traf­fic Sources” divides your vis­its up into 3 cat­e­gories: Direct Traf­fic, Refer­ring Sites and Search Engines. It even breaks these up into whether or not they are new vis­its, return­ing vis­its, the aver­age time spent on the site and the aver­age num­ber of pages viewed. It even shows your adwords cam­paigns and key­word posi­tions. This tool is imper­a­tive to man­ag­ing your ad cam­paigns.

So you may be ask­ing, “How do I set all of this up?” It is sim­ple. Go to Google Ana­lyt­ics and setup your account there with your email address. If you already have a Google account for your Google Maps or your Busi­ness list­ing, you can login in with it. Google will pro­vide you with a track­ing num­ber in the for­mat of “UA-​​xxxxxxxx-​​x”. You will also be pro­vided with some javascript code that con­tains your track­ing num­ber. This code needs to be inserted at the end of body tag on each page of your web­site. If you are not sure how to do this, sim­ply con­tact your web­mas­ter and they will be able to help you.