Karmængine

Unfortunately, I am on a mailing list which gets a lot of requests from small businesses to install Google Analytics on their website.

The gist of such requests:

Hi,

I own a website for my little newspaper stall, which sells newspapers and magazines on the corner of 5th and Maine.

I am starting to get some traffic to my site, sometimes up to 50 visitors per day. I have heard that Google Analytics can increase my website traffic and help me to earn more money with my business.

I have a budget of $200 to spend on getting it set up and running for my website http://bobs-newspaper-stall.free-website-community.com/

Please let me know if you are interested.

Bob

My keyboard and desk is literally littered with the hairs I’ve pulled from my head when reading such emails.

So I’m writing a post here, the link to which I can send as a standard response to such emails.

Let me deconstruct what is making me angry about such emails.

1. 50 visitors per day

This is great, good job. Firstly though, how do you measure this amount of visitors? Are you one of those evil nasty website owners who uses a ‘hit counter’ on their site? Do you already have some statistics software installed, or some kind of log analyzer? Why do you need Google Analytics then? Is there additional data you wish to see? Which data?

How many visitors do you expect a traffic analytics software can give you? Do you understand that counting eggs doesn’t increase the number of eggs?

If you are getting 50 real visitors per day, have you given any thought to promoting your website?

2. I hear good things about Google Analytics

I hear good things about the Hubble Telescope, but that doesn’t mean I need one so I can see the sky. Google Analytics is a turbo diesel-powered pneumatic sledgehammer of a piece of software. There are, of course, simple pneumatic sledgehammers, or plain sledgehammers, or even just little hand-held hammers available to you. Do you need the planet-smashing power of Google Analytics, when you just want to tap a nail?

You have to understand that when you ask me to dig a mile-wide hole for you to plant a tiny seed into, I am going to wonder exactly what is going to grow from that seed. State your goals, or you have none.

Understand what you’re asking someone to do. You can learn yourself about Google Analytics, about website promotion, about the internet in general, which you should do, if you ever want to run a successful website. Don’t just throw money somewhere and expect to make a profit.

3. You want to spend $200

Ok good, you have a budget.  That means that somewhere you have calculated your potential revenue and profit and have decided that you should spend $200. On what? On your website? On promoting your website? On promoting your business? On hiring someone to ‘fiddle’ with your website?

Google Analytics is free. Documentation on how to install it is free. What do you expect to gain from hiring some guy to help you see statistics about your visitors? Do you have an action plan, incase you see some trends in the data?

4. My website is on blah-blah-keyword-blah-keyword.free-website-hosting.com

Unless you want to attract the very lowest-budget customers to your site, stop being a cheapskate and get a proper domain name. $10 is all you need.

Also get those damn keywords and damn hyphens outta there…!

And that, folks, ends my rant for today.