Are your web efforts effective?

When are people coming to the site? What are they clicking on? How long are they staying? Where are they coming from? What time of day are the coming? How effective was my last facebook post? Are people reading my emails?

These are all valid questions, The easiest answer that I have found is Google Analytics ( http://www.google.com/analytics )

GOOGLE ANALYTICS IS FREE, AND EASY TO SETUP!

There is no charge for using the tool and it is a SIMPLE setup:

1. Sign up for the account with Google Analytics.
2. Paste for lines of javascript  into the page that you would like to track
3. Check back after data has accumulated..

Tracking who is coming

Google Analytics is a powerful tracking tool that gives you the content owner information to determine what is successful and what is not. The image shows our traffic by day. This give us an accurate picture of what is working and what is not, based on the spikes and the dips. The spikes and plateaus below are from when items were posted to Facebook.

Google Analytics has a huge set of metrics that you can use to determine the success of a given effort.  The tool allows you to bench mark so that you know when your exceeding normal traffic.

Another feature that I think is worth calling out, is the Site Overlay tool.  It tells you what people are clicking on, what that path is through the site, and provides you a  visual of EXACTLY what was clicked on.

Map

One of the questions that I love to get answered is… Am I reaching the people that I am trying to reach? I have included the Analytics map and my interpretation of the data below.  The majority of the traffic is coming from Washington State where our ministry is located. What is interesting is the amount of traffic that is coming from around the Country and World.

As we drill down further, we can determine traffic at the city level, and here is the interesting thing about traffic from the state level for us.  Port Townsend is located on the right side of the left quarter of Washington state, where there are only 4 dots each representing only a few clicks. This either means that the ISP is located in Seattle or… that the majority of our traffic is coming from outside of the Area.

Traffic Sources

Where your traffic is coming from is another metric that has been helpful to us in determining the success of our efforts. So if we were to launch a campaign with Facebook or Adwords, I want to know that people are coming in through some other gateway giving false positives or negatives on success of a campaign.  The data below suggests to me that Facebook is a great referral tool to get more people into the top of the funnel, and direct ( which is people keying in the URL ), are people receiving the emails, or people already connected to our site just staying up to date. There are 107 people in the time period reported here that found it through Google organically ( without paid direction )

This page is not meant to be a full endorsement of Google Analytics, more to say this is a tool that a lot of people have used and has provided them with a lot of valuable information that will help them make decisions about the future of their organization. I have called out a “few” features that  have been helpful to me, but it is also not intended to be a full feature list on behalf of Google Analytics. Please check out their Demo ( http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html )  online for a full feature list .