Use Google Analytics to understand who visits your site

Google Analytics is a piece of software that tracks visitors to your website and then tells you about them.

It records an amazing array of data, including where the people are coming from, how long they stay on your site and which pages are the most popular. It also includes tools to drill down through the data in a variety of ways, so you can see detailed reports on specific keywords, visitors or cross-reference other demographic data.

Although Google Analytics is made by the same company as Google search it's a totally different product, so don't be confused by the name. It gets its data about your website using a small piece of code embedded on your pages that reports back to your analytics account, it doesn't actually track anything using Google search.

It's an impressive package that is free to install on your website and is invaluable for anyone who is using their website to advertise or sell to customers, as you can track and analyse almost every important aspect of what your users are doing. Understanding your potential customers is one of the most important things you can do for your business. It also produces pretty comparison graphs and maps for those of us that liked maths at school.

If you've recently installed Google Analytics (or if we've done it for you) but you aren't sure where to go with it, check out this official video. If you haven't used Analytics yet this is also a great introduction to the power and productivity of this tool.