Google Analytics helps you monitor how well your website is doing in attracting visitors - and then helps you take action to improve. Your adword campaigns can also be checked, along with cost (revenue or profit) per click for each keyword - including many other criteria such as locations (region, country, city). In addition, you can look at reports on how to best tune your content. You can monitor the steps landing page visitors take on your site so that you can improve it. Often small design or content changes can make a huge difference, so you want to run different versions and compare their effectiveness. The ultimate goal is of course to lead the users all the way to the sign-out and not lose them on their way to it.

There are an endless number of tools and services available, such as Statcounter, which we have used next to self-made tools in the past for our own site and most of our clients'. Now we are also starting to run Google Analytics in parallel and see if this provides us even more visibility or improves usability. At first sight this seems a powerful tool and best of all it is FREE. Of course, what you need to do is sign on and provide some of your private data, but that's what you have to do with any other tool as well. As audio and video content becomes ever more important, Google Analytics' latest feature as reported on the Google Analytics Blog site also supports audio content analysis. Click the picture below for a product tour on Google Analytics.