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1.  Take a look at this coupon.

2.  Take a look at KMart’s facebook page.

3.  Don’t do what KMart did, which is basically forget that the internet exists and that people send coupons to other people.

4.  Profit.

… look no further than this excellent short film.

I work in the marketing industry, particularly in the field of analytics. To criminally oversimplify my job, I take data, load it into database, and use software to allow users to analyze that data. Let’s say a client sends out a mailing to 10,000 people in order to illicit some kind of response, either a phone call, the mailing in of a form, or a visit to a website. We take that response data and give the client actionable information on where to more effectively spend their money to more effectively target those people from whom they are more likely to get a response, which can eventually translate into revenue for our client.

Web analytics is basically applying the same principles to tracking the visitors of a website, be that website a massive e-commerce site like Amazon.com or a site like mine… a blog.  Google Analytics makes getting usable information from your site incredibly easy.  This article will go through the basics of how to set this up.  I’ve found two ways to set this up and they both work.  I’ll call the first way The Easy Way, and the second way The Really Easy Way.

The Easy Way

1. Open an account with Google Analytics.  If you already have a gmail account, you can use the same credentials.
2. Take the HTML provided by Google, and place it in the footer of every page of your website that you want tracked, preferably just above the closing body tag.
3. Sit back and watch as your statistics roll in.

If you have a site that runs on a particular piece of software, there are lovely people out there who may have written implementations of Google Analytics specifically for the software that you use.  In my case, my blog is powered by Wordpress.  As luck would have it, Joost de Valk has written a nice implementation called Google Analytics for Wordpress which leads us to our next section…

The Really Easy Way

1. Download Joost’s Google Analytics for Wordpress and un-zip the archive.
2. Upload the folder to the wp-content/plugins directory on your web server.
3. Paste your Google Analytics ID#  from your Google Analytics account into a text field.
4. Sit back and watch your statistics roll in.

It’s that simple.  When all is said and done, you can take a look at your website’s statistics in your Google Analytics Account.  Since my website is relatively young and I just implemented the code on my website today, you can see how immediately the results are registered (see screenshots below).

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Marketers mine your facebook page for information.