It’s a real question.

The other day I was looking at a site for a client and when I looked under the hood I was surprised to see (okay, not that surprised) that they had never hooked the site up with analytics.

This means they know basically NOTHING about what’s been happening on their website for the past three years.

Sure, they could dig out the server logs and run them through a simple program, but this isn’t going to tell them much.

I was disappointed, selfishly, because I always enjoy sharing before-and-after stats with clients.

Getting analytics going isn’t hard. You can sign up for the free Google Analytics product and have the code running and collecting data within 20 minutes or so. Maybe an hour if you get confused halfway through.

Once it’s running, you don’t have to touch it. You don’t even have to look at your stats if you don’t want to. But they’ll be steadily collecting as the days, weeks, months and years pass.

There’s gold in those stats.

If you’re one of those people who haven’t signed up for an analytics program and installed the tiny bit of code on your website, it’s time to make a change.

Here’s a great free resource to help you get this done. Eugen Oprea has a free Google Analytics course that walks you through setup and understanding the data.

It’s at http://www.eugenoprea.com/google-analytics/. Go sign up now.

It’s free, and I don’t get anything for sending you there.

Another analytics resource is GetClicky. This is a great little service that gives you real-time, as-it-happens data on your website. You can actually see the clicks individual users make as they go through your website.

I like this service, which is paid, because it makes me look at my visitors differently. I learn a lot by putting myself in their shoes and wondering, for example, “why did they click that link, not the one above it?”

Sometimes I learn a lot just by seeing someone go to a page I know needs work, and then they disappear from the site instead of staying engaged. Kinda brings focus…

You can get GetClicky here, and yes, that’s an affiliate link because I think it’s a great service and it’s helped me fix one of my sites, so I can recommend it confidently.

What holds you back from installing analytics? Or from making good use of it? Share in the comments.

We all want more traffic to our websites, right?

The answer to getting more high-quality visitors might be right under your nose.

If you’ve got Google Analytics installed on your site and have at least a little bit of traffic to analyze, download this short report (just 8 pages — with pictures!) and you’ll be on your way to finding new sources for good traffic to your site.

http://websitemomentum.com/files/analyticsreport-excerpt-1.2.pdf

There’s no opt-in for this report. Just download it and start making use of it.

If it’s helpful (which I think it will be), come on back and get onto my newsletter list so you can be sure to get the advance discount as soon as the full version (10 times as long, 10 times the business-buiilding goodness) is ready to go.

(As a bonus, you’ll get a free report on how to set up sharing buttons on your website, including cut and paste code for you to use.)

Photo by RobeRt Vega

This solution should still work with Google’s new (2010) asynchronous code snippet. I haven’t tested it, though.

If you’re doing frequent work on your website, there’s a good chance your biggest visitor is the person who greets you in the mirror every morning.

So?

Image by striatic via Flickr creative commons

So if you’re not excluding your visits from Google Analytics, you’re creating some crazy data.

Now, it’s a given that your analytics data is never perfect, but if you’re throwing it off by 1, 2, 5 or 10%, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Luckily, there are several reasonably easy ways to remove your own visits from analytics.

I’ve got my favorite, which I’ll share here. It’s not the only way. For example, you can exclude by IP address. This works well if you’re always connected from the same place (like work). It doesn’t work too well for me, though, because not only can I not figure out my IP address, but I’m often working from home or coffee shops.

My choice is to exclude my visits based on cookies I set in my browsers.

Three steps:

1. create a filter to block your visits.

2. create a special web page to set a cookie in your browser (not as hard as it sounds).

3. visit that page in all the browsers and from all the computers you use.

Ready to dive in?

Watch this video, then open the sample html file and download the screenshots.

If you need a refresher on the settings they are:

1. name of your choosing
2. custom filter
3. exclude
4. dropdown to “user defined”
5. pattern of your choice: no spaces or quotes/apostrophes
6. not case sensitive
7. add your profile to right hand box
8. save

If this was helpful, please share it using your social media tool of choice. You might also want to sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar.

Questions? Ask them in the comments!