So you’ve gone through the Getting Started on Your Website web guide, and you’re feeling pretty great about what you’ve put together—content, images, a logo, and even a few press releases. Congratulations! Your job has just begun.

As beautiful as your website might be, it’s not a museum artifact. It’s a service for the public, and just as the needs of the public is constantly changing, so should your website. If your website doesn’t keep your users happy, they’ll stop visiting, and what is the point of a website without visitors? If you want to ensure your website is successful, you need to keep it well-managed, relevant, and updated. Luckily, there’s got a free, comprehensive tool to you to do just that—Google Analytics!

Google Analytics comes standard with all GovHub websites and is part of our services to our agencies. Google Analytics data can tell you a lot about who’s coming to your site, what they’re looking at, and whether or not they’re finding what they need. You can use this information to help drive your decisions on everything from content to web design. And as you probably know, getting approval on changing anything in government is much easier when you have the numbers to back it up.

Get started by logging into your Google Analytics account. If you don’t have an account yet, open a support ticket with your Gmail login credentials and the web address for your agency website.