Do you know who is visiting your website? Do you know what you visitors are interested in? It is very difficult to derive answers to these questions if you don't have any form of web statistics at your finger tips. To perform web analysis, you are going to need accurate statistics. Statistics that will tell you everything about your visitors - where they come from, what pages they are looking at, and how much time they spent on your site.

Fortunately, you do not need to spend a single cent to obtain such information. Google offers a free web analysis tool, known as Google Analytics. Using this tool, you can track the activities on your visitors.

To use Google Analytics, you need to be the owner of a Google account. Once you have registered for a free account, you can proceed to add a new website profile for your site. If you have multiple sites, you can add multiple profiles. Once you have added a site, a code snippet will be provided. All you need to do is to copy and paste the Javascript snippet on to all your web pages. This is the tracking code, and it's essential that you do this right. Otherwise, Google Analytics can't receive data from your site.

Once you have installed the code properly, there is nothing more to do on your part. The data is not updated in real time. The delay is about a few hours. But don't let that bother you. What is important is that the tool track the stats accurately. You can login to your Analytics account and take a look at the stats any time you want.

The tool reveals important information about your web visitors. Here are some important pieces of information that you get to see in Analytics.

1) Traffic sources.

You will be able to see where your web visitors are coming from. Are they coming from organic search traffic? Are they referred by an authority site? Or are they visiting your website by keying in the URL directly?

2) Keywords.

Very likely, the bulk of your traffic will be coming from the search engines. Someone searches for something using Google, and your site appears in the search results. They click through, and ends up on your site. You can see which keywords bring you the most traffic.

3) Conversion rates.

This is one of the most important metric - your conversion rate. All the traffic in the world is useless to you unless you can convert the traffic. Traffic conversion means that the visitor does what you want them to do. You may want them to sign up for a free newsletter, or you may like them to make a purchase. If they perform the action, Analytics registers the action as a conversion.

When you put all the information together, you get to see which traffic sources convert best for you. You may then decide to channel more of your time and resources into acquiring traffic from these sources.