In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast we’re talking about website analytics.
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When I started building my very first niche websites I didn’t use any sort of web analytics or tracking. I simply didn’t know such thing existed. Eventually I stumbled upon such tools and I mind was blown. Prior to looking at real statistics and data I would simply guess about my website visitors and their behavior.
Don’t repeat my rookie mistakes. Web analytics will help you improve your websites without guessing. A good analytics platform will show you how many people visit your website and very specific pages of your website. You’ll be able to see where these visitors came from and where they went. You’ll be able to see what they clicked on and how long they stayed on those pages.
Warning, this could be very addictive. I certainly catch myself getting lost in analytics for hours sometimes. However, just looking at all these stats isn’t going to help you grow your business. You need to actually analyze this data and it will help you understand what’s really going on.
If you see that all of the sudden you got a lot of traffic from a specific website you should look into that. If someone shared your link somewhere and people loved then it’s a good sign. You might thing about ways to replicate that success. If you’re looking at your analytics and you realize that your website didn’t have any visitors for a few days (while it normally gets a lot of traffic) then it might mean that your website hosting provider failed and didn’t tell you about it.
You can also set up very specific goals for your website and a good analytics platform will help you achieving and tracking these goals. For example, your goal might be to get a visitor to a blog post, then take them to your landing page and finally have them fill out a form. With analytics you’ll be able to track each visitor and see if they made it all the way to the form or not. You can once again analyze the data and understand how you can improve that process so more visitors complete that task (or goal).
There is so much more that you can learn and figure out with analytics!
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Resources mentioned in today’s episode:
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– Alex
