As we’ve said elsewhere, it’s important to keep tabs on your site. More than just keeping up with content, however, you also need to know how well it’s performing. Enter analytics.

There are free and paid options for analytics, and for many organizations the default go-to solution of Google Analytics (free) suffices. The important thing is to actually use the tool, not just set it and forget it.

Implement, Measure, Adjust

The first step is to generate a goal or set of goals for your site. What defines a successful site for your business? This is the place for concrete numbers, be it number of new customers, dollars generated, or what have you.

With your goals in place, now it’s time to measure how successful your site is in reaching them. Analytics tools tell you where your visitors came from, how long they stayed on your site, which pages they looked at, which pages they left from, and a host of other data. You can see which pages are holding people’s attention, and which aren’t. If you’re running a PPC campaign, you can also use conversion tracking scripts to report how many visitors became customers after clicking on your ad.

Now that you’ve got some information to look at, you can make adjustments accordingly. Look at which pages are performing the best, and use that list to modify your poorest-performing pages. And, you should always be tweaking your best performing pages as well, to make them perform even better. Don’t forget about split testing!

The moral of the story is to implement now and perfect as you go. The best way to improve your site’s performance is to have a clear picture of where you want it to be, then take soundings and change course as needed to get you there as fast as possible.