What is Analytics?

Let’s take a step back and break down what “analytics” really means. What does the word itself mean and how can it help us in the online world?

Hi, I’m Vi Wickam with today’s honest SEO Basics Quick Tip, brought to you by Social Edge and the Get Listed Program.

What is Analytics? Now, a lot of people don’t really understand what analytics is. 

Analytics is kind of a fancy word, but all it means is information that you analyze. It’s the study of data. 

So, generally speaking when people use the word “analytics”, what they’re talking about is website analytics. They’re talking about what is the data that goes along with your website? 

So analytics data might include things like how many visitors come to my website each day, each week, each month. 

How many visitors of those came from California? How many of those visitors came from the United States? How many of those visitors were from Russia? 

Now, if we’re a local business, then visits from outside our service area probably aren’t that important. 

And there’s a good chance that some of those visitors may be spam. They may not even be real visitors. 

So if we’re a US-based service business, or retail business, and we’re getting all sorts of visitors from Russia or China- chances are those aren’t really legitimate visitors that we care about. 

Analytics gives us the ability to gather that data and then to parse it. To work our way through it and see what data here matters and what data here doesn’t matter. 

So analytics is the study of that data and figuring out what data matters to us and what data doesn’t matter. 

There are all sorts of analytics tools out there that let us look at this data. And one of the biggest, most important tools out there is a free tool that anybody can add to their own website called Google Analytics. 

That’s it for today’s Quick Tip!

If you have questions, leave them below in the comments and I will be happy to answer them. 

If you have other questions that you would like me to address in another Quick Tip in the future, feel free to leave me a question in the comments, and I will answer it in a future Quick Tip!

Have a great day, and I’ll see you next time!