Do you know what your goals are? Have you let Google know? You should.

Google Analytics allows you to establish goals for your website and will even measure your goals for you so you can determine how successful you are. If you need actionable data, you can get it by measuring your goals and using the information to make necessary changes regarding how you track and measure data and how you act on the data you track and measure.

Your sales funnel is an integral part of that process. By knowing how your traffic flow should result in a sale, you can place the proper metrics where they need to be in order to tell you where in the process you are not meeting your goals. Then you can take that information and make the necessary tweaks and changes to improve the sales process. But it all begins with tracking. Google Analytics is a great tool. You can learn more about setting goals through Google Analytics here.

There are a ton of analytics packages out there. Many of them are premium paid packages and they are very good. I wouldn’t down talk them at all. But there are just as many free ones. The one I’d recommend (if you’re going to go free) is Google Analytics. Even if you are considering one of the paid analytics packages, Google Analytics can stand on its own against most of them.

While there are some specific data that Google Analytics doesn’t track. For instance, it won’t tell you which specific link people are clicking on to go from page A to page B. But it will allow you to see which pages people navigate from and to within your website. For most small business, that’s enough.

But Google Analytics has other cool features too, including:

• Site Overlay - a cool feature so you can see what percentage of visitors click all of your links
• Benchmarking - You can see how you stack up against the general competition in your field
• Browser Percentages - You can see what percentage of your visitors use Firefox, IE, or any other browser
• Traffic Sources - You can view where your traffic is coming from
• Custom Reports - Create your own reports based on data that is important to you
• Set Goals - Meaure your success against your own goals
• Top Content - See which content is getting viewed the most

Google Analytics has plenty more great features as well. If you are a small business owner you can do well with Google Analytics. You don’t need fancy software that costs a lot of money. If you do then you know you do. If you’re not sure, Google Analytics is probably enough.

So many small businesses pay a service to create their website, and they think they can place a big check list beside that to-do item and never think about it again. So wrong. Everything online is a process, and thank goodness it is. You can always update your site, add content, tweak your profile and improve your Google rank.

The good news is that there are some great online tracking tools that can help you improve your site, draw viewers, and know which of your webpages draws them in–and which ones are tanking. Knowing your bounce rate can make all the difference.

What’s a bounce rate?
It’s not how fast you can jump on a trampoline–it’s when someone visits your site and literally bounces in–and bounces out. They don’t go any further. They’re a one page wonder. Usually that means they either thought your site was about something else, or you didn’t hold their interest.

When measuring your bounce rate on Google Analytics, be sure to check several things:
Your Page Visits
Time on Site
New Visitors
Each tells you something different. For example, if a new visitor comes to your site, stays less than 30 seconds to a minute and leaves, you’ve got a bit of a problem. It may be in your title, your keywords, or with the graphics of your site, lack of content…in other words, you failed to hook your viewer. Consider making some changes.
If a new visitor comes to your site and stays more than a minute, you can consider this somewhat of a success. Even if they didn’t click to other pages, you held their interest. Perhaps they’ll revisit later. I call this “circling the camp.” Oftentimes, a visitor is itchy–they’re not ready to commit, they want to know what else is out there, but they did circle the perimiter–they know who you are and where you are. Success.

How to improve your bounce rate?
Make sure you page is navigable. Can they find where to click through easily? Are you links underlined and a contrasting color? Is your site too jumbled? Has it been a while since you added new content?
Try improving just one of these areas and watch your bounce rate for improvement.

Be sure to check out your content report and analyze every page of your website. Chances are, you’ve got a wink link. Find out where you’re losing your viewers, and you just figured out where to start implementing a few changes.

Attracting quality visitors to your small business website isn’t easy, and you won’t always know what exactly worked–but your efforts will garner results if you’re tenacious. I bet you thought I was going to say patient, but patience isn’t enough. Dogged determination and hard work are just the beginning and the key to your success is in setting goals, making plans to get there, and then tracking your results so you know when you’re doing something right.

What are your initial goals for your website? Do you want to shoot for sheer volume to start off? Or would you rather judge the online presence of your success by sales? Both are valid.

The first step most website owners use is to sign up for Google Analytics. You need to watch your traffic for about three months to get a good idea of how you’re doing. Are there certain days that traffic spikes? Is it after you send out an e-newsletter or email promotions?

There are two kinds of visitors: one time visitors and repeat visitors. Both are important, and knowing how long they visit, how many pages they view, and how often they return is very helpful to understanding what you’re doing right and what you can improve. The more people who know about you, your products and your services, the more you build your reputation–and this approach will eventually lead to sales.

A couple of great features on Google Analytics you might want to check out are the Visitor Trending section and the Average Pageviews section. Get familiar with this portion of Google Analytics because this is where you learn the most about your visitors–how long they stay, how many pages they visit, and over time, you want to improve your average.

Next, visit the New vs. Returning Visitors section. Here, you’ll learn everything from bounce rate, unique visitors, and time on site. It’s like having a webcam showing you which items a customer picks up, and which ones they bring to the register to purchase. You won’t begin to understand it until you’ve let some time pass as you track your website’s visits.

As you get comfortable with Google Analytics, you can begin to make form a solid plan of action. You can brainstorm about ways to build viewer loyalty and gain those wonderful return visits, as well as reaching out to new viewers that help spread the word about your business and business website.

Something great happens as you continue to build your online presence. You become proud of what you’ve accomplished. You set goals and then get to celebrate achieving them–and every small success cheers you on.

A hit is a hit is a hit…or is it? How many hits does your website get? You’ve probably been asked that before, and even if you can brag you get a million hits a month, does it mean what you think it means? How do you measure traffic on your small business site, and more importantly, how do those hits turn into sales?

To understand how to track your website traffic, you have to understand what a hit is.
A website “hit” isn’t as simple as you think. It’s not when someone types in your website name, or find you on Google, Yahoo, or MSN and clicks on your site. That’s not the only definition of a hit.
A hit is a file–and your webpage may contain one, or one thousand. A hit can be an image, written content, or order form. One of your webpages could contain many “hits.”

But what matters is not how many hits you get, but if the hit leads to interest–a sale, a contact, or a networking opportunity. A simpler page with only one hit might just do the job.

Ways to Gauge Your Site Traffic:
Visits, Pageviews, Unique Visitors, Time, and Referrers.

These five tracking tools are essential to any website owner. You need to know who comes to your site, how many times they return, how long the stay, and how they got there. Take a few minutes and visit your dashboard and take note of who your visitors are. This knowledge can help you create a website that’s worth visiting. and is a great marketing and networking tool.

You know your product or services. You know what your clients need–but do you know your keywords? Analyzing your keywords allows you place these all important words and phrases at just the right place on your website and blog–so you can improve your ranking and bring much needed traffic to your small business website.

It’s worth taking the time to write out your keyword list and give it a hard look.
You may be missing important elements.
The web is like a giant, complex phone book. No one can find your small business unless you’re under the right heading. That’s what keywords and keyword phrases are—and just like in the phone book, it sure helps to be at the top of the list—or placed in a big border everyone can see.

The best way to get familiar with what keywords you need is to check out WordTracker, AdWords.Google or Keywords Analyzer.com. Other great keyword analyzing sites are: Nichebot.com, Webmaster-toolkit.com, and SEOkeywords.com. Any of these sites will help you zero in on which keywords and keyword phrases will work best for you.

Keyword analyzer programs are a great way to brainstorm for keywords you may have missed, and you might want to try a free trial. Go a little deeper and you can peruse what headlines and URLs landing pages focus on.

Keyword analyzer programs search for keyword phrases, searches, results, Google and Overture Campaigns (this is only a partial list of what they can search for).

What’s all this mean?

Keyword phrases are obvious—it’s a list of keywords that have been searched.
Searches will show you the actual numbers made on a particular keyword.
Results show just how many websites matched that keyword—exactly.
Google Campaigns show the number of AdWord campaigns are based on a particular keyword.
Overture Campaigns show how many overture (advertisements) there are for each keyword.

You’d never consider going into business until you knew if your product or services were needed, and keywords take it one step further. By analyzing your keywords and zeroing in on exactly what people are searching for, you are able to shine the light on your small business—and who doesn’t need a spotlight?

You’ve hired a web designer, paid for search engine optimization, made sure your keywords and keyword phrases are placed correctly within the content of your site, and you’ve even learned a thing or two about links–but what you don’t know is if all your hard work and cash outlay has paid off.

Can your small business website be found quickly?

There’s a great book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths, which reveals that it’s much smarter to capitalize on your strengths, what you’re already doing well, than to attempt to work on your weaknesses. They’re weak for a reason–you’re not good at it.

So take that basic principle and apply it the success of your small business, and in particular, to the success of your website. One mark of a successful website is how well it ranks on search engines. The higher your website is placed on search engines, the easier it is for people to find you. Face it, how many times when you’re searching online, do you wander past page five? Not often.

The easiest way to check your site rank is to simply type in one of your keywords and see what comes up. Does your website come up on Google on page one? Two? Ten? Check some other search engines and see what happens. One way is to do an advanced search link on Google and check for your keywords, then scroll through a few pages and see if your site is listed.

There are other ways. As with anything on the Internet, you can pay to find out your site ranking.
There are several companies such as WebPosition.com, MarketPosition.com, and AllBusiness.com (some offer 30 day free trials), that offer software that can show you your rank on various search engines within minutes. If this interests you, you might also consider WebCEO.com and SEOReporter.com.

Why go to all the trouble and expense to find out?

Because you want to know what you’ve done right.

It’s vital to know how people find your website so that you can then repeat that process many times over! You want to know what search engines have given your site a higher rank, and you want to know what keywords brought them to you.

If you have a good web designer, you can ask them to view your logs and this will show how your viewers are finding your site. If you write a blog, many blog sites such as Wordpress and Blogger will provide a log for you. You’ll be able to see what exactly what words and phrases were typed in, (very enlightening since you begin to see the problems or issues people have and what they are searching for).

You’ve already invested so much in your company and in your website and other online tools. It take time and effort to build your site ranking, and there’s nothing more motivating than to see progress.

By knowing your small business site ranking, you can continue to build upon your strengths.

With any website, tracking is important, but if you are trying to build a business profile online, you`ll need to really take note of this. It`s vital to know who is visiting your site and why. There are a lot of trends that can be spotted in the statistics and contrary to popular belief, the sheer number of visitors is not the most important.

Unique visitors. This tells you how often NEW people are coming to your website. If you have 2,000 visitors and only 500 unique visitors, that means most people are coming back an average of four times. This is good to know.

Pages. Understanding where people are entering your site and where they are leaving is also useful. If they are all flooding to one particular page, you might want to optimize that page for conversion. On the other hand, if people are tending to leave from another page, take note and see if you can`t figure out a way to keep them longer on the site.

Search terms. Where are these people coming from? The list of search terms that your visitors are using to find your page can be handy to look at. It will give you an idea of what to optimize for, as well. If a lot of people are including the words “rubber tire” in their searches and ending up on your website, you might want to add an article or two that is optimized for those keywords.

Tracking is vital to online business success. You need to know who is visiting your site so you can tailor the experience to their needs and hopefully up your conversion rates.

Are you tracking your website traffic? This is a subject that we don`t touch on too much, but it`s still an important one. If you don`t know where your clients are coming from, how can you increase them?

Knowing where your clients and website visitors come from is the best way to boost your online business. That`s why tracking and analyzing your website traffic is so vital. By keeping on top of where everyone is coming from, you`ll know which ad campaigns work and which should be dumped.

One of the biggest expenses for most small businesses is advertising and publicity, so it makes sense that you would want to know exactly which ads are working. Keep track of it and you will be able to increase marketing efforts in the areas that are producing and boost your clients.

There are tracking programs that allow you to keep an eye on these statistics and it`s very helpful to do so.

Your bounce rate is the number of people who land on your website and don’t click through to another page. Your analytics package should tell you which pages have a high bounce rate. Pay attention to this number because it is a negative and you need to do what you can to reduce the bounce rate.

Instead of looking at your average bounce rate across the entire website, which isn’t very useful, look at the bounce rates for your individual pages. Most websites have high bounce rates (somewhere around 70%-80%), but you don’t have to. You want to get that bounce rate below 50% if possible. Find out what your site visitors are looking for and provide them with information that will help them achieve it.

Bounce rates differ from industry to industry too. Are your site visitors just looking for information or are they looking to buy a product or service. If they are looking to buy something and all you have is information then you’ll get high bounce rates. If they are looking for information and you have products or services to sell then you will have high bounce rates. If either of these is the case then you are likely targeting the wrong keywords and phrases or you are not making the right offerings. It could be a combination of the two. To fix it, do a little deeper analysis of your site visitors’ needs and tweak your web pages to provide that or create new web pages and drive your visitors there.

Your bounce rate is a very important statistic and says a lot about what your visitors really need. It all starts with web development and builds from there.