Google Analytics is a great free statistics package that allows you to see information about the visitors to your website. It can be very useful in finding out if your marketing is working and where is best to invest your time and money. Not only does it show you the number of visitors but it can also show you how they came to your site e.g through Google organic searches, Adwords etc.

You do have to be careful though taking everything at face value as sometimes the data can become skewed. There are many sites that will show as referral visits to your site increasing the traffic to your website (often quite substantially). With further investigation these sites are often not referring real traffic to yours and are actually what’s known as spam referrals. Spam referrals can make your web stats have a sudden unexplained spike in traffic which often comes with an extremely high bounce rate. To be able to find out your accurate statistics you need to be able to remove these spam referrals by creating a custom report.