The following is a guest post by Andy Hayes

Are you using Google Analytics to monitor your website performance? It’s a goldmine of free market research data, but most businesses fall into one of two categories:

• They mistakenly decided they didn’t need analytics. How can you improve your website if you aren’t measuring it?
• They installed analytics and then never used it.

If you rely on your website for any part of your sales or business lifestyle, then please let this be a call to action: start using analytics to measure your online performance. What can Google Analytics (or any other analytics package, for that matter) tell you?

Pencil by The Shane H

Where are your customers coming from?

In an analytics package, you can learn where your customers are coming from. There’s no comment box or clerk having to ask everyone where they heard about you – the tool does it without them even knowing. Wouldn’t it be nice to know:

• Which one of your advertisements and banner ads were working well? Which ones send people but those people don’t stick around?
• Did that blog feature actually send any web traffic?
• Does that paid directory listing not actually send you any web traffic?

This isn’t just data: this is market research information you can use to measure and evaluate your online performance. And it’s free!

What parts of your website are popular? Which parts stink?

Unfortunately, many businesses put a website up quickly and without much thought. They wouldn’t do the same for a real world storefront or send out a salesperson without a clear message and call to action.

Analytics can help you understand how popular and effective the pages are in your site, such as:

• How many customers arrive and leave immediately?
• Where do customers linger? Is there a particular popular section?
• Do you have a page nobody reads? Is that because it’s not important or because nobody can find it?

It’s easy to over-analyze this stuff here, but it’s important to do some digging and see what’s happening behind closed doors – what exactly are people doing on your website?

How’s your search engine optimization?

Last but not least: SEO. Regardless if you are a newbie to this area or your website is a well-oiled machine, analytics can teach you a few things, such as what are people actually typing in the search engines to find you. It’s not what’s here that will surprise you (often weird phrases will show up), but moreso the stuff that isn’t here. It goes back to what I said earlier: you can’t improve performance if you aren’t measuring it.

Andy Hayes is the managing director for Travel Online Partners, a travel online marketing firm.  Don’t miss their popular Google analytics ebook to make this most of this free market research!