Small Farm Central

Since you spend precious time keeping your farm website fresh, you need to determine how effective your website is in engaging visitors. What sites do they come to your site from? What are they searching for on search engines when they visit? Do they visit from bookmarks or email referrals? How long do they stay when they visit? What pages do they like the best?

All of these questions can be answered using a web analytics package. The standard these days is Google Analytics mainly because it is free, but also because it is a very impressive piece of software that provides lots of detail on your website and it integrates well into other Google services.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to delve into using Google Analytics to understand the visitors to your farm website. What's bounce rate? How many visitors a day is a good rate? What is a referral? Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.

Installing Google Analytics on Your Website

The first step is getting Google Analytics the data it needs to track visitors to your site. The basic concept is that a small piece of code needs to reside on each page of your site. Obviously, this process differs based on how you developed your website and who hosts it. It may be difficult to do this if you developed your website yourself in pure HTML, but if you use Small Farm Central (or have advanced functionality on your site) it is easy. I am going to describe this process in relation to installing analytics on a Small Farm Central site, but the steps will be the same for any site except how the code is added to your pages.

1. Go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html and sign in with an existing Google account or create a new account.





2. On the resulting screen, click "Sign up."
3. On the next page, you will be asked for information about your website. Enter your "Website's URL." This is the address that your customers type in their browser to get to your farm website; such as http://www.yourfarm.com. The default for the account name is fine. Be sure to agree to the rules and regulations.





4. The next screen should provide you with the code that you'll paste into your SFC control panel.

Add the Code to Your Website

Now we are ready to get the code on your website so the analytics package can start to record your stats. This process is different depending on how you developed your website; of course if you are running a Small Farm Central website, it is very easy. What follows is an explanation for farmers that are using the Small Farm Central system.

1. Log in to your control panel as usual.
2. Navigate to the "Script block" section of the control panel: Display / Template settings / script block
3. Paste the code from above into the text box provided, click submit. If there is any code existing in the text box, do not alter it. Simply paste below the existing text and click submit. Now the code will be included on every page requested by your visitors

Take the time to add Google Analytics to your website now; in the next few weeks I will describe how to interpret your results. So, if you add the tracking code to your website, you will have something to look at when the go further into how to use the stats. Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.