One of the hottest topics we teach is the importance of measuring the results of your marketing efforts. This ­certainly can apply to any ­promotions you run or advertising you place—but it also applies to your website performance. Yet this is an area that many businesses neglect.

The good news is it’s not hard to do. Better news: It’s free.

If you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, you need to get it now. The free program provides valuable feedback on how many visitors your site is getting, where they come from, how much time they spend at the site, and what pages they view the most.

Without this information, you’re flying blind when it comes to improving your website and you may start doing what many business owners do—changing their site for no other reason than because they become bored with it.

Ideally, your site should be a work in progress—you have to constantly test and tweak to get the best results. One of the best tools that Analytics offers is the ability to split-test. Say you are considering two different images for your home page. Split-testing lets you serve version one with Image A to some visitors and another with Image B to the rest. That way, you can see which held visitors’ attention longer.

Analytics is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg—there are various tools out there that can tell you more about your site’s performance—but it’s a great starting point.

But how does your website rank? And how does it compare with the competition? One of the best tools to tell you about a competitor’s site is called Alexa. You can input a URL and discover how a site ranks worldwide or by country and how many people are linking to that particular site—one of the key ways to gain credibility with Google.

If you’re looking to get some idea as to whether your Google Analytics results are good, bad, or otherwise, then watch this space. We’re working on a program that will enable you to compare your website performance with others within the jewelry industry, providing you valuable feedback on how your site can be improved. (It’s one thing to know that your website gets 40 visitors per day—but what does that mean within the industry? Is an average of three minutes a good result compared with other jewelers?)

We hope to reveal many of these mysteries in upcoming issues. And the best part: A lot of this information will be free.