Google Analytics

There is probably nothing more important to any decision-maker than knowing the variables and factors surrounding the decisions he/she has to make. This is as true for the CEO of a Fortune-500 company as it is for a small business owner, information is power, and analytics on your website can help provide you with insights into your customers’ behaviour, consumer trends and most importantly help you identify lucrative opportunities.

When you set up your website, if you are using a CPANEL server (which most servers are – you can find out by visiting www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel) then you will most likely have a basic traffic tracking service installed on your server, such as AWStats, providing you with limited statistics on your website’s traffic. What you will see is something like this:

This tool can be useful for determining the bandwidth usage of your website, for example a Gym might have a downloadable daypass on it’s website for users to download, using this tool it is easy to see how many times the daypass was downloaded every week:

Beyond this however, AWStats’ utility is limited, and shouldn’t be relied on as the only analytics platform to inform your decision making, particularly if your website represents an element in your overall business strategy.

A variety of analytics platforms have sprung up to fill this gap over the years, some are quite specialized for online businesses or e-commerce websites, you can view examples in the articles listed in the Further Reading Index, in this case we will be dealing with Google Analytics.

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