Are you measuring your website traffic?
Recently, during conversations with business owners in the Toulouse area and with other BiBNT members, I’ve had cause to ask how they were measuring visitor traffic on their websites and I’ve been surprised to learn that very few are actually doing it – though some were indeed pretty good at spouting off their visitor numbers.
Since my marketing and communications work includes website creation, measuring and analysing website traffic seems a perfectly natural thing to do. Funnily enough, it seems other people don’t have the same love of statistics – go figure!
Mostly, amongst the people who said they didn’t have any measurements in place, I found it was simply because they didn’t know how. So I thought I’d try to help.
Why measure?
Back at the beginning of the century (2001?), measuring your customers and potential customers was easy. If you had a shop, you could simply count the number of people who passed by or came in the door. A service business may have counted the number of phone calls they received in response to an advert. That information helped determine whether or not you ran a promotion again or if it was necessary to put a sandwich board out on the pavement, or if you had spent your money well.
Your website is an extension of your shop or service business – with the potential to reach a lot of people who may never have found you otherwise – so measuring traffic in and out of it is necessary for making good business decisions too – especially if you have spent a lot of time and money in creating it.
You can easily discover the number of visitors to your site: when they visit, where they are, how they found you, etc. and use that information to improve the site and/or your business offer.
There are two simple ways that you can measure traffic on your site:
1. For those of you that don’t know how to access the coding for your site the simplest way is to ask your webmaster or designer to add a measurement tool for you (see next point).
2. I find that Google Analytics is by far the best free site measuring tool (plus it can’t hurt to encourage Google to visit your site regularly). You’ll need to sign up or sign in with a Google account (free). Just follow their instructions to “add your site”. Google will supply a bit of code that you copy and paste into the code for each page of your site (Confused? Go back to number 1 above). Once the code’s been inserted correctly, visit your Google Analytics account for a daily update and valuable insight into how your site is performing.
I won’t overload you here with how to analyse the data and do things to improve your site’s performance but I’ll post information to help with that another time. The important thing right now is to make sure you’ve got a site measurement tool in place and we can take it from there.
Hope that helps. Are you measuring your site? Are your friends measuring their sites? Let me know if have any thoughts or questions in the comments below.
Submitted by BiBNT member Ronald Smith.
