Well, have you? With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, there is no better time than now to check your website traffic.

1. Login to your Google Analytics Account. Don’t have one? Shame on you! This is a free and essential tool for online marketers. Google Analytics will give you a ton of insight into how people find your products and website. I suggest you sign up now.

2. If you are using the new interface design, you want to click Traffic Sources on the left navigation then, Search, then Organic. In the old interface you will click Traffic Sources, All Traffic Sources, then click Google/Organic within the report.

Here you will see all of the traffic that is reaching your site via organic search.  This is a great way to get keyword ideas for your Adwords campaigns (you are running those too, right?) and general search query ideas so that you can target your customers and ads correctly. It will also show you negative keywords to bid on. Example: If you run a tennis shoe company, you would want to bid on keywords such as tennis shoes, running shoes, etc, but you wouldn’t want to come up in searches for horse shoes, so you would make horse shoes a negative keyword.

You can click over to the Google Webmaster Tools tab to see what exact queries your customers are using to find your site.  It will even tell you the keyword position, impressions and clicks. This is also a great way to track how your customers are finding your site.

Some of the most important stats are located on your dashboard when you login to Analytics.  These stats include impressions, clicks, time on site and bounce rate.  You can even click through to see which pages on your site have high/low bounce rates.  This can help you understand what content your users find useful and what pages they find not so useful.

Analytics is a great way to easily keep track of your website traffic.  There are tons of more useful reports and stats and I will delve a little deeper into some of them in the next few blogs, so stay tuned!

Questions or comments? Leave them below! What steps do you take to monitor your website traffic?