Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Google Analytics - Great Free Tracking

About a month ago, I was curious and clicked on the "Analytics" tab in my Google Adwords account. When I got there, I was a bit disappointed that I need to be "invited" to join the program. I said "what the hay!" and signed up for it anyway. Who cares, right? Well, last week I got my official invitation to join and being curious, I logged on and set up an account.

For anyone looking for a quick and easy way of tracking your website statistics, this is a GREAT and EASY way of doing it! I was quite impressed and now I almost rely on it! It provides me with such a good overview of my site as well as who my visitors are and what they are doing. It isn't perfect, nor does it provide all of the information you need, but it gives me enough to make quick judgments on what is going on. And again, IT'S FREE!

I have tried a handful of counter sites to do the same thing and most want your money in order to provide you with any meaning information (a counter tool at the bottom of your site is clearly not enough). The one counter site that I do like and still frequent is StatCounter. Its free version provides you will all of the good details that you want to see, but only for the last 100 visitors. For me right now, that is enough to get an idea what is going on. It provides a little bit more "raw" information than Analytics, which I like.

In either case, you SHOULD be tracking your visitors quite regularly to learn what is working and what is not. I'll get into more details on this in later blogs. Happy hump day!