What are analytics? In this instance analytics, or stats (statistics), are tools used to analyze web related traffic. Whether it’s to your website, blog, or other web arena, you should be aware of who is visiting your site, how they’re getting there, and what they’re looking for once they arrive.
Having this information will help you to direct your time and promotional efforts to the proper areas, thus helping to insure your marketing plan will be a success.
Another piece of good news is that although you can buy an expensive software package, in the beginning, you don’t have to. There are quite a few good programs available for free.
Before you even start looking at the data, have your desired objective in mind. What are the goals of your marketing plan? Once you see all the reports, in all the various formats, it is incredibly easy to get overwhelmed and just dump the whole process, feeling like you don’t have a clue.
Just hold up a minute before you make that rash decision. You are, or want to be a professional writer, correct? Part of that responsibility is to understand your business and know how to grow your business. This data will help you do that.
In the beginning, with your goals firmly in mind, you’ll want to mainly focus on the reports which will help you analyze the whosits and whasits that are centered around your desired outcome. In other words, what factors are producing the outcome you want? For now, just ignore the rest. It will only add to the confusion.
In the beginning, you may only look at a of couple reports. And that’s okay. Get familiar with them, that way you can look at a glance and see what’s going on, and if it’s going in the direction you want things to go.
There are a few reports which are more important than others, and tomorrow, we’ll talk a look at those.
This is good info--I'm still just looking at "how many visitors" reports. :) Can't wait!
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