I’ve had a free “Google Analytics” account for some time now, but I’ve not taken it seriously. In the past week, I revisited my account and realised what I’ve been missing out on.

If you’ve not heard of Google Analytics before, here’s what it does..

It produces a wealth of statistics on what’s happening on your websites. You can see the number of pages viewed, how many visitors look at each page, which keywords people used to find your site, and so on. Now this is nothing new. You can get such stats from your web host (via cPanel, if you have it) or from other stats services on the web.

But for me, the beauty of Analytics is that it is so quick and easy to access. I’m usually logged into my Google account continuously, so I don’t need to log in separately to my Analytics account. And, since you can add any number of websites to your Analytics account, you can very quickly and easily view the stats for all of your sites. Oh, and you can also track sales or signup conversions. That’s something I’m going to implement soon.

Another neat feature is the “site overlay” which opens one of your pages and shows you how many visitors have cl.icked on a particular link on the page. I now know, for example, that 23 per cent of the people visiting my “City of York” travel website, hit on the link taking them to my other travel site, “City of Brighton”.

You can also let other people have access to some or all of the statistics. For example, I recently did one of my rare search engine optimisation projects for a client, and I added the Analytics code to the pages on the site. I was then able to give her access to my Analytics account - but only to view the stats for her website.

I’m still discovering new information within Analytics. For example, whilst writing this article, I explored further and found that since 1st January this year, visitors to my creatingheadlines.com site came from 83 different countries!

OK, so how to you go about getting Analytics to work for you? Here’s the steps to take:

If you don’t already have a Google account, go and get one. This simply involves getting a Google Mail account, which gives you access to all of Google’s services. If you don’t know how to do this, then watch the video which is in the new gift in the Download Library (”Newbie QuickTip Videos” - see below).

Log in to your Google account and look in the “Try Something New” column to find “Analytics”.

Sign up for the service and add your first website to the service.

Then, copy and paste the code snippet you are given to every page on the site you want to include in Analytics.

Explore all the possible options. The Help system is great!

Don’t drown in statistics! Only use what you need, or you could waste a lot of time. I speak from experience!

One last point.. statistics are always one day behind. So you won’t be able to see today’s web stats until tomorrow. I hope you find this useful.