They say the best things in life are free. I'd say Google Analytics falls in that category. Are you using it?

Google Analytics is a service that gives you a detailed breakdown of your website traffic. Google provides it for free. That is to say, for all practical purposes it's free. There is a 5,000,000 monthly page view limit. If you're having 5 million visitors to your site every month, paying for web traffic Analytics falls in the "happy-to-do-it" category.

Being free but useless doesn't qualify anything for "best" though, so what makes it so good?

It can help you improve both your website and visitor satisfaction.

How? Let's look at an example of how you can use the info provided by Analytics:

You've got a mid-size site (16 pages) and on one of those pages you list the employment opportunities that you have at your place of business. When you view your monthly website traffic breakdown over the course of 6 months you routinely see that your second most visited page is your "employment" page.

You have an opportunity.

Now you can improve your website by making it easier to navigate to the employment page by placing a section with a link to it on your home page. Additionally you can make it easier navigate to other import pages from the employment page, or even list sales or updates. If you improve the ease of navigation from the employment page to other important pages, you'll see their traffic increase as well. Visitors to your site will appreciate the ease of access and your site will be better because of it.

You win.

All websites I build have Google Analytics installed. It's free, it's easy and it provides useful information about your website traffic for you to use. Has your web designer set this up for you? If not, you're missing out.

Feel free to contact me if you'd like Analytics set up on your site and have monthly traffic breakdowns emailed to you. I specialize in affordable website design and it'll cost you less than you think.