You might recognize that quote from the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. While the bears were away, Goldilocks stopped by their cottage to check things out. (To this day, I have no idea why these bears lived in a cottage, nor why they were eating porridge. Vegan bears, maybe?) The real question here is, “Why are you starting a blog post with a children’s fairy tale?”
One of my many fans shot me an e-mail recently, asking:
“Swami – is there a way to know who’s been looking at my site?”
If you’re a web-savvy business owner, you already know the answer. If you’re not web-savvy, don’t feel bad. My experience is that most business owners are not. And, quite frankly, why should you be? You have a business to run. You have plenty of other things to do. Why add learning an entirely new skill set to that? The good news (as you might’ve guessed) is that you don’t have to. It’s Google to the rescue.
Google has created an entire suite of tools for you to better understand what’s going on with your web presence. Among those tools – Google Analytics. This tool is free and provides you with an unbelievable amount of data concerning your website. Here’s a screenshot:
This dashboard page provides you with an overview of your visitors. You can see which pages on your site are the most popular. You can see how many visitors have hit your site, how many pages (on average) are viewed, the average time a user spends on your site, and how many of these visitors are hitting your site for the first time. The pie graph at the bottom shows you where your visitors found your site. This is extremely helpful in determining how best to spend online marketing dollars.
Want more information about your site visitors? No problem there. You can drill in on any of these topics. Google provides excruciating detail about every visitor to your site. It’s a bit different than that old counter you used to have on your site! With this, the three bears could’ve determined not only that someone had visited their cottage, but known how long she stayed, what she did while she was there, and even what she liked and didn’t like. Good for business, but would’ve made that story a lot shorter!
Convinced this is something you should take a look at? Check out the Google Analytics product tour. And, as always, if you want to drive more traffic to your site and grow your business the smart way, let me know! I’d be happy to help!!
-Dan Woodman, The Swami of Success