I recently started using Google Analytics and it's one of the most exciting tools I have ever seen. I'm guess that makes me a little dorky, but I don't care. I check my stats all of the time and I believe that if you have a website you should have Google Analytics on that website.
 

What is Google Analytics?

According to Wikipedia:

"Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service[1], currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.[2]"

To use Google Analytics you create an account. Then you link the account to your webpage. It takes about a day for Google to start analyzing the traffic to your page. You need some computer skills to use Google Analytics, but not a lot.

Once Google Analytics is up and running you can log in and see detailed information about the people that are visiting your website. From the main dashboard you see if Google Analytics is working properly, the total number of visitors that have visited your website in the last month, the average time spent on your website and the bounce rate. (I looked up bounce rate; bounce rate is the number of people that landed on your homepage and then left. This general means that they reached your website on accident and therefore you should not count them in your monthly traffic report.)

After this dashboard the information gets more and more detailed. You can view where people are located that are viewing your website, how long they spent on each page, where they were referred from or if it was a direct link.

Based on your findings you can alter your communications or marketing strategy. If only 10% of your traffic is from Twitter and 30% is from Facebook, maybe you should spend more time on your Facebook campaign. Or maybe you got a special from Google Ads so you placed ads for two weeks and saw an increase in traffic from the ads; then you should consider running more ads.
These are just two examples. But it's important to know what is working and what isn't working and Google Analytics is a great way to figure out what is successful and what isn't.

I touched on a few very basic features in Google Analytics. I know that it does a lot of other things, including allowing you to set goals for yourself, but I have not had enough time to play with those features let. Check back in the features for more ways to use Google Analytics to improve your website traffic.