This morning I was at a Mindshare meeting with some business owners.  We get together once a month to talk about things important to our business and to share ideas.  We function similar to an informal Board of Directors.  Much of today's discussion covered marketing issues.  Each of the businesses represented in our group have a website, but only the business owners with an IT background said they use Google Analytics on their website or even knew what it was.  I have found this to be quite common among small business owners and even larger companies that do not have web development staff.  Even among companies that do have an IT staff, it is not unususal for the senior marketing manager not to be using this outstanding FREE tool.

Google Analytics is free, very useful, and easy to implement on your website. 

Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and follow their instuctions to sign up.

You will need to have access to your website code, so you can cut and paste the Google code to each page of your website.  It is easiest if you can just cut and paste it to your footer, that way it will show up on every page.

Once done, you will have access to a lot of interesting data about how many people are coming to your website, how long they stay, if they come back, and what they did while they were there.  From this data, you can get lots of ideas about changes that might convert more visitors into customers.