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Just like every other marketing medium, a website has to earn its keep. The good news is that you can find out a lot more about what people do when they encounter your website than when they come across your offline marketing messages.

How many people visit your website is just the start. You can also find out

• what they look at
• how long they spend browsing it
• how many take action after browsing
• and more.

And armed with the knowledge about how people are interacting with your website you can tweak it and tweak it until it is getting the response you want.

When we make changes you can:

• see if there's been an improvement in how many people visit or how long they spend on your site
• decide if something's worth doing again
• know if the website is bringing in enough revenue by itself (a great position to be in) or if you need to continue a mix of activities (probably the most advisable course).

That's all very well, I hear you say, but exactly how do you measure all this? The chances are that your website provider will have a statistics package, but it may not offer all the information you need.

The solution is Google Analytics. It's free, simple to install (just a matter of copying and pasting some code onto each page of your site) and provides a wealth of information. So if you're not impressed with your stats package or you don't have one, I'd always recommend Google Analytics as the tool to turn to.

We'll take a tour of it next time.