I think the tool that’s made the biggest impact in how websites are designed and maintained over the last couple of years is without a doubt Google Analytics. It’s a free tool, it doesn’t cost anything to use or install and once you’ve got the tracking setup, it’s the best way to figure out what is actually working to get you closer to achieving your goals. There isn’t much that it doesn’t tell you; it’s designed to offer insight into every aspect of activity on your website that you could think of wanting.
It’s not only going to show you all the details of the traffic coming to your website, like where it’s coming from, what keywords they’re using to get there, but it lets you track the goals you want to accomplish. Whether you’re selling products, capturing leads, tracking your goals will help you figure out what percentage of your traffic is actually doing what you want and will tell you what keywords helped get them there.
Armed with that kind of data, you’ll have a huge competitive advantage over everyone else when it comes to tweaking your site to increase your conversions and it’ll help you with furthering your search engine optimization efforts to rank higher for the keywords that are making you money. Imagine how easy pay per click campaigns would be if you knew ahead of time all the keywords that were already proven to make you money.
The best part about Google Analytics is that you can have Google send e-mail reports to yourself, your associates, and allows for different user levels of access to your account. The reports can also be downloaded in PDF or CSV formats, making it very easy to share your information and track how well you’re doing over time. Having your data readily available will give you the information you need to make educated decisions for your future campaigns.
