We are all familiar with the old proverb “measure twice and cut once” that warns us to double check for accuracy in our lives. Let’s take that advice to our online activities. As you certainly know, everything you do online is trackable, whether you do it yourself, or let the NSA do it for you. The problem is of course, the NSA doesn’t share very well.

Do you have a website? If not, let me once of the first to welcome you to the 1990’s. Of course your practice has a website. Do you measure your website traffic? You or your web developer should be measuring your web traffic and your audience. You can purchase all sorts of audience measuring software, or you can install Google Analytics on your website for free (www.google.com/analytics).

Google Analytics is embedded into well over half of the world’s websites. With it, you can easily measure who comes (not individually) to your website, from where, and with what they are viewing your site with. You can review the browsers used, the speed of their internet, what pages are viewed, and how long people stay on each page. Best of all you can review where your visitors are coming from. In Google Analytics visits are broken down most simply into direct traffic (those who typed your URL into their browsers), search traffic (those who found you from searching Google, Bing, or Yahoo), and referral traffic (those who might come from a link such as from www.theopticalvisionsite.com) . In a perfect world everyone knows your name (hearing the Cheers theme song in my head), or in a mostly perfect world, your traffic would […]