I’ve decided that I should right a little bit about analytics.  We are often inundated with people talking about traffic, but what do we really want to know?

  1. Where is the traffic coming from
  2. What are the visitors doing
  3. What keywords are driving people to my site
  4. Are the visitors moving through the site where we want to go?

What tools should a person use?

Free is something that I feel is a great option.  If you are using a host that has CPANEL you have access to AWStats, or are able to download it and install it on your server for free (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/#DOWNLOAD). This is what is known as a log analyzer.  What it does is it looks at every action taken on your site as is recorded on the server through the log.  This offers incredibly detailed information about everything that is happening, some things you don’t really want to see though.  This not only shows users, but also bots.  But you are seeing information that might not be able to help you make decisions.  So what else is there?

Google Analytics.  This is an incredible tool for free.  The thing you have to do is place a tag onto every page.  This is a javascript tag that should be put into the header (that’s where js belongs), but I highly recommend you place it in the footer, to prevent a google outage from handicapping your site.  Google will allow you define goals, see keywords that bring in traffic, look at your ppc (especially for adwords), lets you do an overlay to see which links are clicked the most (not the best but good).

AWStats = good, Google Analytics = Great (http://www.google.com/analytics )

Next time I’m going to go deeper into Google’s tool since I believe it is the choice any marketer should use.  Go get your account, and give me your feedback!

DC