Why Inquir­ing Minds Want To Know
With­out an under­stand­ing of how peo­ple find a web­site, it is impos­si­ble to know where to make improve­ments. For exam­ple, if a high per­cent­age of vis­i­tors come from search engines, then a num­ber of ques­tions arise about the search terms being used, the qual­ity or value of those vis­i­tors, and what else can be done to enhance the site’s search engine per­for­mance (through search engine opti­miza­tion and pay-per-click advertising).

Some pages on the web site will of course get more traf­fic than oth­ers, and know­ing the pop­u­lar­ity of dif­fer­ent pages pro­vides valu­able insight into what vis­i­tors are try­ing to accom­plish on the site. Ide­ally, a cor­po­rate web site needs to find the inter­sec­tion where what a cus­tomer wants meets what the com­pany sells.

How to Add Ana­lyt­ics
The key to under­stand­ing a web site’s effec­tive­ness is summed up as ‘Ana­lyt­ics’. There are lots of solu­tions avail­able, but a very pop­u­lar one is Google Ana­lyt­ics, because it’s free and it mea­sures and reports on a lot of valu­able metrics.

Imple­ment­ing Google Ana­lyt­ics is very straight­for­ward. If you under­stand some basic HTML, you should be fine doing it your­self. If your com­pany has an IT depart­ment, they should have an easy time of it, too. Basi­cally, Google pro­vides a small snip­pet of javascript code to be placed on each page of the web site. The code can be mod­i­fied, but basi­cally it will be some­thing like this:



You can get more details from Google, but before you start drop­ping the Google Ana­lyt­ics track­ing code all over your web site, note this very impor­tant advice:
Place the code at the bot­tom of the page, directly before the tag. DO NOT place the code near the top of the page, or in the mid­dle somewhere.

When the code is placed at the bot­tom of the page, this allows the valu­able con­tent on your page to load first, and that has two big advan­tages:

1. Web pages will gen­er­ally load faster if you keep the script at the bot­tom and let your text con­tent load first. Bonus: Google likes pages that load faster, so it could help you out with their rank­ing algo­rithms.
2. Plac­ing the code at the end avoids ana­lyt­i­cal track­ing errors that may occur if some­one clicks off that page before it has fully loaded, or the page expe­ri­ences some sort of load­ing error.

To sum up, if your web site is not using any ana­lyt­i­cal track­ing code now, make it hap­pen. The infor­ma­tion it will pro­vide is sure to be very use­ful and can be used to make informed deci­sions to improve the site’s per­for­mance. Google Ana­lyt­ics is free, and it’s pow­er­ful enough to pro­vide a wealth of vital information.

Sec­ondly, remem­ber to place the ana­lyt­i­cal track­ing code at the close of the page, just before the tag. Happy analyzing!


Biography / Resume : Karl joined Mediative’s service delivery team in 2008. A year later, he moved to the company’s research department where he conducted online surveys, eye-tracking studies, one-on-one interviews and usability testing. Most recently, he transitioned to the marketing department. Before Mediative, Karl worked in sales and marketing. In 1997, he caught the digital bug and became the original “webmaster” for Roland Canada Music. Around the same time, he began teaching the relatively new topic of Internet marketing to college and university students. Karl’s insatiable curiosity and drive to get to the core and substance of every situation has served him well in his various roles at Mediative.