I don’t have a blog, I don’t have a fancy Web site and I don’t have a profile on MySpace or Facebook, but I do get people coming to my simple little four-page Web site and I’d like to learn more about them. My sister says I want to run some “analytics” program, but I’m clueless. I can edit HTML, but what do I add?
You are right to be thinking of this stuff. Without some sort of decent analytics it’s just about impossible to know who is coming to your site and what they do once they get there. Add one of a number of different free packages, however, and you can extract a surprising amount of information by just poking around when you have the time.
Since you’re comfortable with basic HTML, you also have a bit of a proverbial leg up on most folk because you can easily copy and paste the necessary Javascript into the correct spot on your pages without freaking out or breaking things. 🙂
So there are a lot of different analytic programs on the market, but what I like is Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s powerful and it’s fast enough loading that there’s no performance penalty for your visitors (a big issue in my book). You can sign up for free, but you probably already have a Google account so it’s even easier. Find out, go to Google Analytics and sign in / sign up.
Here’s what it looks like when you “create new profile”:
Once that’s done, you’ll be given a couple of lines of HTML to add to your pages:
Literally, that’s all you have to do. Copy what’s in that box on your own Google Analytics page and then paste it between the </body> and </html> tags at the very bottom of your Web pages that you want tracked (basically all of them).
Now wait until there’s some traffic and you can go back to Google Analytics and see reports like these (these are for my film blog Dave On Film.com, btw):
and, more interestingly, detailed stats about what pages are popular:
As you can see, lots worth checking out and a great way to learn quite a bit more about your site traffic. Hope that helps you out!
Due to it privacy policy, Google Analytics does not provide IP, which becomes its only weakness. Therefore, I make an application program to monitor the visitors IP, combined with Google Analytics.
I have a blog http://www.thelifeisbeautiful.blogspot.com but I tried to install Google Analytics but it says installed, but do not work, do not gathering data. Could you help me?
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I have been using sitemeter.com free version since decades and I have found it to be extremely helpful in improving my placement in the search engines. I am totally a layman in web designing, but site has helped in understanding the fine points of getting into a good search position. I find it very comforting to find my website most times on the first page of Google.
I did add Google Analytics when there was some problem with sitemeter, but I could understand much, as already said I am despite everything a layman in scripting.