So you have a website for your business. Sure it may look nice, but is it effective as far as generating interest? Maybe we should take a step back and ask ourselves, “How can we measure the effectiveness of our website?”

Google has developed a powerful tool called Google Analytics. Signing up for the service takes less than five minutes and is easy to implement into your website. But here’s the best part: it’s absolutely free!

So what kind of information can Google Analytics track? For starters, you will be able to see how many people visit your site and what pages they view while they are there. A very useful report is the Traffic Sources Overview. With this report, you can measure the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts.

Having said that, it’s now time to get set up…

Where do you begin? First, if you don’t have one already, you’ll need to set up a Google account. Fortunately, this is also an easy process. Simply go to www.google.com and click on the “Sign in” hyperlink in the upper right-hand corner. There is a brief form it fill in – it will take less than a minute to fill in and the only personal information you need to supply is your e-mail address. Once you submit the form, a validation e-mail is sent to the address you supply with instructions on how to complete the signup process.

With that out of the way, you can now access Google Analytics. This time you will want to go to www.google.com/analytics/. Click on the “sign up now” link underneath the “Access Analytics” button and enter your Google account information to begin the sign up process. You will need to enter some basic information, such as your name and telephone number, and agree to their terms of use. Once you have completed this, a screen with a textbox containing the code needed to track activity on your website will appear.

Copy the code in the text box and save it into a text file on your computer. This is the code you will want to add to your webpages. Please note that there is two sets of code: one labeled “ga.js” and another labels “urchin.js.” This article is geared towards new users of Google Analytics so it is recommended that you use the ga.js code.

The next step is to add the code to your website’s pages. If you’re not a web designer you may want to defer this step to your webmaster. But if you have even a basic understanding of HTML, this step isn’t too difficult. Open the code into a web design program or even a text editor such as Notepad. Access the code and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. As complicated as webpages are, they generally end with the following two statements:

</body></html>

Insert the code immediately before the </body> tag. Once you do this for all of the pages on your website, you’re good to go!

Once you are set up, you can log into Google Analytics at any time to check on your website’s statistics. Techniques for improving both the quantity of hits and generating leads will be covered in future articles. As for now, Google Analytics contains plenty of information to get you started towards optimizing your site (such as their Adwords program.) You are definitely encouraged to explore this information.