You can't manage what you can't measure

I've heard a lot of people use this quote lately: "You can't manage what you can't measure", and you have to agree that it makes perfect sense, in particular for something that you can measure easily, like the performance of your website.

The question is what to measure exactly, or how do you define performance? I guess it depends on your objectives, which by the way I hope you already set for your website.

Here are some things your can measure easily:

• Unique visitors: How many people come to your site every day?


• Page views: How many pages have been viewed on your site?


• Average duration: How long do your visitors stay on your site? You might have hundreds come in on one day, but if they stay 20s and leave it might mean that they arrived there by mistake or didn't like what they saw.


• Top pages: Which pages on your site get the most visits?


• Sources: Does your traffic come from search engines or from referrals?


• Keywords: What are people searching when land on your site?

With that in mind, I was amazed a couple of months ago at work when I met one of our web agencies and they told me that they never configured Google Analytics for our site. Or any other tool. Shocking.

So if you don't have any tool installed yet to analyze the stats of your website, I suggest you take action today and install Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool graciously offered by Google to help you check the performance statistics of your website.


If you don't want to get in the technical details of the installation, or if you don't have access to the back engine of your site, you can ask your agency to do it for you. Then all you need to do is create an account with Google and login with Google Analytics. But make sure you know what's happening with your site.

Question: Do you measure your website statistics? Which tool do you use?