Why analytics are needed on my website?
Many of our customers ask this question or don’t even know this is something important they should care about on their website. Here is something just recently happened to our site which shows why it could be important to have running on your website.
The past couple of weeks I have been reading a programming book and been blogging about it so I could keep my want for learning going plus see how well it would change the traffic to our website. Well in the end I was starting to get discouraged because our traffic has been small but steady for the past couple of months.
These smaller numbers really was depressing but on one of our twitter posts we had someone comment that they liked our blog. So the numbers didn’t add up for what the world was saying and what Google was reporting back to us. Oddly enough 100% of our traffic was coming from Russia but that is another issue we will have to investigate on a later date.
To help diagnose this issue we decided to take a look at the server logs and see what it was reporting. To our surprise we saw a major difference in the traffic between the server logs and Google Analytics. Right away I knew exactly what the problem was we didn’t installed the tracking code for Google on our new theme.
Google uses a small chunk of JavaScript code to track people coming to your website. This is a double edge sword which has some pros and cons.
The Pros
Google can now track a lot of aggregate data from your visitors which typically our server logs can’t track.
- What search terms are being used to find your website
- How long did they stay on your website or page
- What was their exit page
The Cons
There are a couple of cons to this technique.
- One major con is that if you don’t install the code then Google can’t track the connections to your website.
- If a visitor turns off JavaScript in their browser then Google will not be able to track those connections. But then most of the web will not work for them either.File like PDF downloads won’t be track because they don’t typically include JavaScript.
There may seem like a lot of cons but really these are very few compared to the mass amount of aggregate data you get from using it on google.
So in our case we lost a lot of valuable information for the couple of weeks the code was not installed as part of our theme. Even though there are some cons I would say the amount of information Google provides in their reports is well worth the effort.
Now back to the main question does your website need Analytics? The answer varies for each website owner. If you just have a website because you need to have it like we did back when the yellow pages ruled the world then maybe. But honestly how could it hurt to know how customers are using your website. Do you know how they found it? Or even better what is the most used page on you website? Is it the Home page or is it the contact us page? Without knowing some basic information about your site it would be hard to know if the return on investment is worthwhile.
Give it a try and see what happens it could change how you look at your website. By the way typically we install this for all our clients even if they don’t know it. For us it is great when our client asks us these questions and we can just pull up their website traffic and provide them answers.