You've got your website. It's your organization's virtual front door. You work hard to lay out the welcome mat, tend the flower boxes, wash the windows, and offer enough content to get people inside for a heart-to-heart coffee table chat about you and your mission.

So you've got curb appeal. You've got substance. But how do you get folks into your neighborhood and knocking on your door in the first place?

Great question. Boosting traffic and attracting eyeballs to your site is key to online success. If people aren't coming and viewing your site, it isn't doing its job to move your mission forward.

Tracking site traffic: Knowing who's coming to your site

The first part of improving is knowing how your site performs now. The easiest and cheapest way for assessing that is a handy tool called Google Analytics. This is free and tracks website traffic. Got some question you want to know about who and how people are visiting your site? How long the average person spends poking around? What search term they typed into Google to come across your little home away from home on the interwebs? How many people living in Burkina Faso visited your site on a Tuesday at 10:23 pm? The Google knows. It knows it all. And it will tell you - provided you've signed up for a free account and had us install the tracking code it provides.

No Google Analytics yet? Interested? Check out our Tips and Tricks post about tracking traffic.  You can also view an informative Google-created video there giving an overview of Analytics.