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Google Analytics: One of the Best Kept Secrets on the Internet

Good analysis of your website statistics is crucial to growing your subscription website.

I’ll give you a few reasons why this is the case.

By watching which articles get the most visitors, the publisher can adapt the content to precisely meet his or her member’s interests.
Webstats can show surprising results. A membership website focused on how to run a successful Indian restaurant in the UK found that they had more subscribers from outside the UK than from within the country. This led them to change their approach and focus.
Good webstats packages show how often your loyal members return to the website. The more they visit the site, the more likely they are to renew. By watching whether frequency is increasing or decreasing, a publisher can predict renewal rates. This allows them to react to problems before they hit the bottom line.

And there are many other advantages that will quickly become clear to you once you start regularly viewing the stats from your website.

So which stats program should you use? Some managed website services, including SubHub have integrated webstats reports. Some people choose to purchase software such as WebTrends, but for my money everyone should plug into Google Analytics.

And the really good news is the application is free!

Before going through the process of setting up your Google Analytics account, a word of caution.

Google's motivation for giving away such a powerful application free is to persuade you to use Google Adwords. But you can use the analytics application without having an Adwords account active.

I would strongly advise you not to set your Adwords account going until you have taken the time to understand how to run this sort of marketing campaign properly. It can be one of the most powerful marketing tools you will ever use ... or it can be like a money black hole, consuming cash faster than you can say “How much!!”

To setup your Google Analytics account, simply go to:

http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html

…and follow the instructions.

You may need some help from your web developer if you are not technical. Persevere! It is worth it.

If you are a SubHub customer, simply sign up for a Google Analytics account and then let your account manager know. We’ll do the rest.