How do you know you are getting targeted traffic? Website analytics.  Many small business owners really have no clue about what sort of traffic they are getting or even how to figure out what the numbers mean.  This post is meant to be a quick introduction to website analytics.

Most web hosting packages you will come with some sort of statistics. There are also programs or services you can purchase.  Probably the best free option right now is Google Analytics.   When looking at a web analytics program/service, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

* Who has been to your website?
* What were they looking for?
* Where did they come from?
* How long did they look at your content?
* Were they locals?

To answer some of these questions, you will need to understand the terms used in web analytics.  For a good list of terms used in analyics, please see Wikipedia .  Below are two terms that I try to point out to folks because they very important.

Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User – The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server or viewing pages within a defined time period. A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor’s computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

The last point I want to make about web analytics is time.   Time will show trends and this is very valuable when understanding your traffic.  If your website is new, or you recently updated portions of the site, you will need to give it some time to see how that will effect your traffic. The more data points you get, the better informed you will be.

I want to encourage all small business owners to take a few minutes and take a look at your traffic. Can you figure out what is going on with your site?  It is not that hard, once you understand the basics.

Additional Articles:
Below are some excellent articles, written by fellow local search marketers about how analytics can help with your local search marketing campaigns.

• The Most Important Analytics In Local Search
• Using Analytics For Local Search Optimization
• Tracking Local search Traffic with Analytics

Our last product update was a while ago, but that certainly doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing anything. Quite the contrary in fact, we’re so busy we often forget to go home! Our last update went over our Business Amenities feature, which has been very well received by our customers. Since then we’ve been pretty quiet on the blog, but we’ve kept ourselves busy behind the scenes with a few changes to the front-end of the website that you may have noticed browsing around, and lots of changes to the back-end to support our increasing traffic.

First, the front end; we’ve updated our product information page to give businesses a better idea of what we do and what we’re about. Along with that we’ve upgraded the process for adding your own business information. You’ll see a call-to-action to add your business in the top right of the product page, or check it out here. You do have to be logged in to add your business so if you don’t yet have an account at CitySquares.com now is a great time to get signed up. We were getting a lot of duplicate entries and we realized people needed an easy way to search for their business before they added it. So our new ‘add business’ form integrates a live search as you type – so if you’re already on our site your listing will appear and you can just edit the existing information!

Along with the new add business process we have added a new eCommerce system so you can find and purchase your business listing all online! Currently your only option is to upgrade to a deluxe listing, but we’re hoping to expand that to include other options in the future. I encourage you to sign up and see if your business is already listed for free and of course check out our awesome upgrade options!

You may also have noticed that our banner ads have changed slightly – you can see those throughout the site. We made the move to IAB standard size ads in early September along with our ad management system overhaul. We are now using Google AdManager to serve up all the ads you see across the site, which allows us to easily serve up Google AdSense in locations that we have unsold inventory or choose to display them. As of now we have set it up so our paying local advertisers will always trump AdSense in priority so we maintain our hyper-local focus. We have also worked in a pretty neat system where we’re able to provide banner advertising site-wide all the way down to a specific neighborhood and anywhere in between. You could even exclusively buy select neighborhoods if you chose to target your ads.

Otherwise we’ve been pretty quiet on the front end, but we’ve got some big changes coming soon. I can’t show you everything yet, but I can provide a couple sneak peeks.

Besides the usual bug fixes, that’s pretty much everything on the front end. On the back end, we have moved our infrastructure onto Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 using RightScale to manage our instances. Justin is blogging our experience over at his blog. I’d recommend going there to get more details on what we’ve done, there’s way too much information for just one post.

Outside of the infrastructure changes, we’ve been going through all of our database queries and optimizing as much as possible, tweaking and removing where necessary, and trying to get every bit of performance our of our current system as possible.

So we’ve been pretty busy as of late, with much more to come as we expand the site to new areas. Keep an eye out for changes and we’ll do our best to keep you updated here.

As always, we love to hear from you so, if you have any thoughts, please leave us a note in the comments!

– Michael