A good business website has to have tracking in place so that you can see how many visitors your site receives, what pages they visit, how long they stay on your site, how they convert into to customers and so on.

Google has a great free tracking system that is packed full of easy to understand statistics. The tool is Google Analytics and you can register for it over at www.google.com/anlytics. Being a Google product you can access it by logging into Analytics with your Gmail account credentials, that is if you have a Gmail account.

Google provide all the necessary information to get you up and running. You’ll need to register your site, confirm ownership by uploading a html file to your server and then copying and pasting a small piece of code into your sites html file. If this sounds difficult to you then ask your website designer or hosting account if they can help you out, I assure you it is really straight forward and if I can do it you will be able to.

After you set up your Analytics account and waited the necessary time for tracking to start (about 48 hours) then you may want to download a free desktop tool that will allow you to keep up to date with how your website is performing without having to log into your Anlytics account.

The tool is called Polaris and you can download it directly from Desktop Reporting. The tool uses the popular Adobe Air platform so you will need to download this also (it comes bundled with Polaris). Word of warning, do not spend too much time watching your stats, it can be seriously addictive.

A single user account licence is free and if you want to manage more than one account you can get the full-version for $15 a year (at the time of writing).

To your online business success,

Karl Foxley