When you sign up for a Google account, you get free access to some powerful tools, one of which is Google Analytics.

To sign up for Google Analytics, click My Account, where you’ll be taken to a page that lists the services you’re signed up for and those you’re not.

Click Analytics and follow the registration wizard. At some point, you will be given a code snippet that you need to paste into your website. Google Analytics then checks that code, and once it finds it, there’s a little green tick to say it’s okay. If you are evaluating blog traffic, various blog platforms have ‘plugins’ that allow you to paste the code and then place it in the correct place on your blog page.

If you have a company-provided website, check your ‘back office’ to see if it’s possible to paste the code. This is then automatically incorporated into your replicated site. You will need to check Google Analytics again to see if you get the ‘green mark’.

Otherwise, you’ll need to contact the person who designed your website (if they didn’t) and ask them to enter the code.

Once you have obtained the ‘green mark’, you will be able to visit the Google Analytics Dashboard. Here you will get a very useful overview as follows:

• Visits in the last month by day in the form of a graph
• Site Usage: Visits, Page Views, Pages/Visits
• Bounce rate: calculated as the total number of people viewing a page/total number of visits as a %
• Average time on site
• Visitors overview that allows you to drill down into things like the language of visitors, browsers used, and other information
• traffic sources
• Map Overlay – A map of the world showing where the highest concentration of your visits are coming from
• Content overview showing which pages are visited

All of this information can help you understand where your top visitors are coming from in the world, what other sites are you referring people from, the volume of visitors, how long people are spending on your website.

So my advice is if you can use Google Analytics on your website then go for it, it’s free and it gives you an incredible depth of information.