To find out how many people are visiting your website, how they are finding you, and what they are doing once they arrive at your website, you’ll want to set up some sort of website analytics program. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and tool we recommend has the best price of all – free!
Most servers come with analytics tools, such as Webalizer or AWStats. These programs use server log information to generate results, but they are fairly crude. For example, they cannot tell the difference between a human user and search engine robots. High-end packages, such as Omniture, are out of the price reach of most political campaigns.
A popular alternative is Google Analytics, a free web analytics service offered by Google. It is currently used by over half of the 10,000 most popular websites. It’s easy to set up and even the default reports can provide a wealth of website traffic information. Google Analytics can track website visitors from all sources, including search engines, banner advertising, pay-per-click, email marketing and even links withing documents, such as PDFs.
To create an account, visit www.google.com/analytics and Click ‘Sign up now.’ You will be asked to sign in to your current Google Account or to create a new Google Account if you don’t have one. If you are already using Google Adwords for your campaign, you might want to use the same account for analytics.
The signup is fairly simple. Once you have added the site you want to track, Google provides you with a block of code. Copy this and save it to a file.
The final step is to add the tracking code to your site. You’ll need to copy and paste the HTML code directly into each page of your site. (For Online Candidate websites, go to the Site Setup page and add the code into the ‘Tracking Code’ section.)
That’s it! If everything is set up properly, you’ll start to see visitor activity in your reports within an hour or so.
You can drill deep into reports to find all sorts of information and insights. For example, your ‘Traffic Sources’ report will show you direct visits, referring sites, search engine and keywords used. The ‘Content’ report will give you an overview of what pages visitors are first arriving at, what pages they look at and for how long, and top exit pages where visitors leave your site.
In a future post, we’ll explore more advanced tracking activities such as Goals and Visitor Segmentation and how you can use analytics information to learn more about your visitors and find ways to attract more of them.
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Tags: analytics, campaign tips, website tips
Just a note, Google Analytics indicates that it will be 24 hours before you see any activity.
Very helpful article though.
True, but we’ve seen data appear within minutes initially. That’s assuming there’s activity on the tagged pages after adding the code…