When running a website, it’s important to know who your visitors are. How many are there? Are there enough to pay for your site? Are the numbers growing? Where do they come from (physically / electronically)? How do they get to your site? What were they looking for? Are you giving it to them? Which pages did they visit? What browser were they using? Does your site look right on their browser? How long did they stay on your site? Was it easy for them to find what they were looking for? Did they convert, from visitor to customer? Did they do what you expected? And another 100 questions that are essential to your venture.

Fortunately the answers to all these questions are not far away. Most hosting packages offer some kind of statistics package. I’ve noticed that Globat (the world’s worst host), while it offers some statistics, they appear to be inaccurate to the point of being completely made up! But other hosts will probably offer statistics indicating the growth (or decline) of your visitors.

As well as the hosting version you could install another statistic tracking package, and the statistics offered are nowadays much more sophisticated than in the old days of simple counters! There are several packages available, but by far the most detailed has to be from Google. Google Analytics is very easy to set up and offers the answers to all the above questions and more. As a webmaster you probably already have an account with Google, whether for webmaster tools, Adsense, Adwords, Email, or a host of other services they offer. So adding Analytics is a simple step.

Log into your Google Account, follow the steps for setting up Analytics, and you’ll be given a small piece of code to add to your page – it just needs to be pasted just before the closing BODY tag. You need to do this on every single page of your site, and by the next day you’ll know exactly how a visitor from Krakow in Poland found your site, which pages they went to, and whether they actually bought something from you! If you use Adwords, then Analytics can be easily configured to test your conversion goals. It’s free, simple and essential!

But, aren’t you worried that Google will have access to all your statistical data? OK, so yeah, they will… But Google already know everything anyway, so what’s the difference?! At least now you’ll know as much as them (about your site!).