Know Thy Customer

Your website is your extension to the world. Regardless of whether you’re trying to sell t-shirts or just sharing info about your church group, you want the site to work. For example, from a design perspective, the site must be congruent with your brand. And from a usability perspective, your site must give people what they are looking for.

So here’s the question: If you discovered only one person were visiting your site very month, would you do anything about it?

What if you learned – to your utter delight – over 100,000 people were on your site every day? Would you do anything differently?

I imagine you would.

The point is this. A website must have a purpose. It must serve some goal. And to determine whether your site is reaching its intended goals, you have to measure it. You need to know many people are visiting your site, where are those people coming from, what are they looking at, and what percentage of those people fail to take some action, like buy your product or send you an email.

Without knowing these metrics, your site is like a kid fishing in a pond, hoping anything will bite the worm!

There’s a neat tool offered by Google to help you become wiser about your site and smarter about your fishing. It’s called Google Analytics. It’s free, it works, and you can get going in less than five minutes.

Here’s a good article what Google Analytics does and how it can help you understand what’s really going on with your site: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/improving-your-sense-of-site.html

For more info, checkout these links:

• Google Analytics
• Free review of your website
• Need a new site
• Ask the SuperGeek