How to Generate Stats for your Business Website

Website Development

A business website gains advantages by collecting data about its visitors, including their location, the pages they accessed, and the duration of their stay on the site. Analyzing this data can reveal opportunities to enhance your website’s performance and its effectiveness in supporting your business strategy. For example, if you discover that the majority of your visitors are coming from upper Manhattan, you might consider reducing your advertising efforts in that area and increasing them in Brooklyn.

How Web Stats (Typically) Work

There are many companies that offer free tools for monitoring website statistics, with Google being the largest provider. Their tool, Google Site Analytics, functions in a manner similar to most others you may encounter. Here’s how it works:

  1. Businesses enable you to create an account (this facilitates directing the information to the appropriate location). Following that, they supply you with a JavaScript snippet that contains elements specific to your account.
  2. You need to add this specific JavaScript (hereafter known as “the script”) within the head section of your website’s pages. Instructions on how to do this are provided in the following section.
  3. Each time someone accesses your website, the script transmits their details to the web analytics company.
  4. The Web stats firm collects visitor information on your behalf and displays it to you.

Putting Web Stats on Your Web Pages

After obtaining the script specific to your account, you’ll need to place it on each Web page you want to monitor. We assure you, this isn’t too difficult.

  1. Using your account’s file editor, open one of your site’s HTML pages.
  2. Locate the closing head tag, i.e. </head>.
  3. Just before the closing head tag </head>, paste the script the Web stats company provided you.
  4. Save your changes.
  5. Repeat these steps for each page on your website until you’ve added the script to each one.

Once you’ve implemented the script on every page, many companies offer a method for testing its functionality to ensure accuracy. Confirm that it’s operational and you’ll begin collecting information about your site visitors.

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