The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.
Peter Drucker

One of the best things about a website is that you can see how often each page is viewed as a person navigates your site. These statistics can tell you what content people are interested in reading. If your homepage is cluttered, the statistics can provide clues to making your website better. The only way to maximize these statistics is to gain an understanding of what they mean and as I’ve mentioned before, metrics matter.

Fortunately, a little bit of knowledge will go a long way. This is the first in a three-part series on web statistics also known as web analytics.

The three sections will be:
Today - Getting started
Terms - Hits, page views and unique visitors
Analysis - What does it all mean?

Getting Started : Tools to measure

If you have a blog, it will have some basic statistics built in. I’d suggest installing Google Analytics. Without a doubt, one of the best tools for web analytics is Google Analytics, and it’s free! It is software that will give you plenty of data and is certainly the best place to get started. Its set-up involves placing a small piece of code on every page that you want to measure. This is a simple procedure that will help unearth a wealth of information about your website. If you need help installing the code, this article will help.

Other options for analytics are Webtrends, Mixpanel or for the power web user Omniture.

Once installed the analytics will take a few hours to populate, so it will be blank initially. Give it 24 hours to capture data and then log in and you’ll have all types of information to view. After you login you’ll see your dashboard, which will display your key metrics.

I’d suggest setting up weekly email delivery of the dashboard. This will send you an update of dashboard in PDF format to your email, and will allow you to quickly review the key metrics of the previous week’s web traffic. If you have a question about one of the metrics you can always log into your Google Analytics and dig deeper. For help in setting this up, view this Google help article.

Next week we’ll discuss what the key metrics the dashboard measures and what they mean to you.

Related articles

• Measure with the right metrics (newstreak.moxleycarmichael.com)