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 basic analytics tools, such as Webalizer or AWStats. These programs use server log information to generate results, but they only provide basic information. For example, in some instances they 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. This is a free web analytics service offered by Google. 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 within 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 or you use Gmail 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 > Site Settings section and paste the code directly into the ‘Custom Code’ tab.
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.
Even with the most basic setup, you can benefit from know where your site traffic comes from and what your visitors do when they get there. If knowledge is power, having analytics for your site will give you plenty to work with.
For more information on setting up Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics Help Center.
Need help setting up Google Analytics? Analytics setup is included in our Site Launch Addon service. This can be added with your campaign website order or at a later time.
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