Who’s visiting your website? How did they get there? And what are they doing once they get there?
Those are questions you probably ask if you control a website, either as a blog author, webmaster, or website owner. If you rent space at a web hosting company, you probably get some sort of free usage statistics report. Typically, these work by parsing your web server's usage log, which keeps track of what files have been requested by visitors. While these packages often give you valuable information, they don’t always tell you everything you want to know.
Want to know something on the Web? Most of us have gotten into the habit of turning to Google for answers. The search and web-services giant has recently made their Google Analytics tool freely available to everyone. While it may not be able to tell you everything you want to know about your website, it can certainly be a valuable tool.
The home page for Google Analytics is http://www.google.com/analytics/. Follow the "Sign-up now" link to start using it. Like most of the new Google services, it's tied in to your Google Account, which is probably based on your Gmail Account. Once you have a Google Analytics account, you’ll be able to use it to track up to ten different websites. That’s a handy feature if you are a web developer who manages sites for a number of clients.
Google Analytics does not work by examining your website’s user log. Instead, it tracks activity on pages where you insert a small bit of Javascript. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage for you. If you have a very large site (for instance, I manage one site with almost 3,000 pages), many of the free statistics programs will only focus on the most active pages. If you are interested in some of the activity in your “long tail” you may not be able to get it. Google Analytics will track all the pages where you’ve inserted the script, so it can help focus your attention. Of course, that can be a disadvantage, too, for it means you need to get that script on to every page you want to track. If you have a template-based site, you can probably add the script that way. Another disadvantage is that it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to track activity on non-HTML files, such as PDFs or MP3s.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Thanks for the link and lead to Analytics. I put two of my blogs on and love the pie charts, the coverage, the great colors. It was a helpful thing to share.