How do you know if visitors are coming to your website or not? Are they finding the information that they need when they get to your website?

One of the most important features you can add to your website is visitor tracking analytics. This usually requires that you put a simple piece of code into every page of your site. If you have designed your website well, then you just need to add the code to a shared component that is included into all your pages.

This code will be triggered each time your site is visited. The code will track the visitor along with lots of great information about the visitor like:

• What website referred them to your site (e.g., a search engine)?
• How long did they stay on your site?
• Did they go to more than one page on your site?
• What browser were they using?

If you have an online product catalog and a shopping cart on your website, you can use this visitor tracking data to see everywhere the user went within your site before they purchased. This is called conversion tracking.
Most of the visitor tracking tools give you pretty graphs to show you all sorts of great information. I’ve shown you an example of a graph to the right that shows the percentage of traffic from each source.

Our favorite traffic analytics tool is Google Analytics because the tool has comprehensive reporting (and it’s free).

Take the time to track your visitors. Once you have this in place come back and visit us to figure out what to do with the tracking information now that you have it!

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