Not sure why I didn’t know this right from the start, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening today… We need to understand who is viewing our web site and why. From what I can tell Google Analytics can help us learn more about where our visitors come from and what they do when they get here. This information will help drive future decisions on what we do with the blog, our product pages, and our youtube postings.
The process of setting up google was very simple and straight forward. You sign up for an account, they assign you a bit of java code to add to the head section of your html and your off and running. RatCat Software is using WordPress to maintain our site, so I first attempted to add this via a plug-in, which too is a very simple and easy to do. Well, it didn’t work as expected and although I only installed one plug-in (there are several to try), I quickly gave up and just added the code directly into the custom.php. Once the code snippet was in place, Google was able to recognize the page and our sites status changed to indicate that the tracking code has been detected on the home page of our website, and Google Analytics is aggregating the data to populate into your reports. So, starting today, we are hooked into the google analytic system and tomorrow we can begin to improve our online presence and strengthen our marketing efforts.