Do you really know who is visiting your store's website? Even if you are getting lots of website traffic doesn't mean it is your targeted local customers. If you are not able to analyze your visitors you are shooting in the dark and may be wasting money.
Many stores in vertical markets are using cookie cutter websites provided by their buying group, association, or major suppliers. These plug and play websites offer a fast, easy way to build a website without any effort from the store. But thees affiliated websites don't have anyway of letting you know who really is visiting your website, except when someone fills out some sort of website contact form. Plus, most of these cookie-cutter programs don't allow you to make the necessary contant changes to optimize your website for your true, local customers who are searching for your products and services.
So what should stores do to analyze website traffic?
I recommend you get a free Google Account and then sign-up for Google Analytics, which is also free. Then all you need to do is setup your website domain in a Google Analytics, grab the Javascript code snippet and have it inserted into every page of your website. Now Google Analytics will update detailed information daily about who, where and how visitors find and use your website. You will be able to see where they came from on the web, what keywords they searched with, what web pages are most popular, and even what state and city they were searching from. Google Analytics allows reports to be sent via email so you don't have to login every time to see certain reports.
With this information you are now able to analyze your website traffic and determine if your website is really working for your store. Lets look at a few examples to help you better understand how valuable this can be for you:
Example #1: You are doing some 3rd party website advertising (ie: AT&T, SuperPages, etc..). You know how much it costs you per month, but is it really driving traffic to your website? With Google Analytics you can see what websites are referring traffic to your website (called referrers) and how many visitors too. Now you can determine if this web advertising campaign is worth what you are paying per month.
Example #2: Lets pretend you sell and service in several East Coast cities, but you are wondering if you are getting any traffic from those local areas. Again, with Google Analytics you can get a good idea about the region, state and even the city your visitors are searching from. You might find you are getting a lot of website traffic from West Coast cities, instead of your East Coast cities. Thanks to Google Analytics you now see you have the wrong visitors. They are not your targeted local, East Coast city customers. You can then use Google Analytics to see why this is happening and make website content changes to help drive the right targeted local traffic to your website.
Example #3: You have a Shop-At Home sign-up page on your website, along with a separate Thank You page. The website visitors can only get to the Thank You page after they fill out the Shop-At-Home form and click the Submit button. With Google Analytics you can see how many visitors actually visited your Shop-At-Home page and how many got to the Thank You page. You may be surprosed to find out lots of visitors are going to the Shop-At-Home page but not filling out the form. Now that you know this you can make changes to the page and see if it helps convert visitors into true Shop-At-Home sale leads.
Hopefully this will give you some insights into how valuable a tool Google Analytics can be for your website. You might be amazed to find out who really is visiting your website.
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