Here’s a recent email I received from a client.

“I think it is very important now to monitor our visitors and the habits of our visitors to our new website and blog. As my Virtual Assistant, I would love to hear your input about how we can go ahead creating such a system.”

Great idea!

Everyone should watch their website statistics on a weekly or monthly basis to monitor trends and look for improvements.

So, here is my reply to Maureen (not her real name) outlining a “plan of action.”

“You are so right Maureen and this is what I propose we do.

Google Analytics

1. Set up an account for you at Google.com
2. Access Google Analytics and add your main website and blog url’s to the reports area
3. add the Google Analytics code to your website and blog allowing Google to start accumulating stats

Google Documents

1. Start a Google spreadsheet to share the data between us
2. Statistics to track on a monthly basis

• Absolute Unique Visitors – how many first time visits to the site
• Return Visits – of those first time visits, how many returned
• Average Time Spent on Site – what is the average time viewers spent on the site
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page
• Country – since you are growing your business internationally we want to monitor your visitors country of origin
• City – we’ll dig a little deeper to uncover what city produces the most visitors

Then we’ll add a 2^nd tab to the document titled Traffic Sources to collect info about:

• Traffic Sources – What are the top 10 – 15 sites that directed traffic to your website
• Unique Visitors – how many unique visitors came from these traffic sources

Then we’ll add a 3^rd tab called Keywords

• Keyword Research – How many visits resulted based on specific key word searches

And lastly, we’ll set up 2 or 3 goals to judge conversion rates.

Goal 1: How many visitors signed up for the free report?

Goal 2: How many visitors purchased a product?

In short, collecting this information on a monthly basis will help us make more solid decisions on your marketing plans. For example, We may need to add more defined keywords in your blog posts, or we may want to focus on our joint venture partners in California since we’ve had a large number of searches from that state.

I will monitor and add the stats on a monthly basis, send you the Google document spreadsheet and provide a summary of what we can do to improve your marketing efforts on a month to month basis. How does that sound?”