Track Your Visitors!
Ladies and gentlemen, I owe you all an apology. I have not yet written about one of the most critical elements of setting up a site. I’ve mentioned the different plugins I’ve installed, and the different ad systems I’ve used but I completely skipped over site analytics. Now granted, a lot of this stems from my SEO background but really any website owner should have at least one analytics program installed on their site. Being able to see where your traffic is coming from, what they are doing while on your site and perhaps most importantly, where and when they are leaving your site are all crucial to the success of your website.
My personal favorite is Google Analytics (GA) which thankfully is free. The program was called Urchin in the past and was a paid service. However, after Google acquired the company a couple of years back, they made it completely free. Of course they now have access to traffic statistics for millions of websites but that’s a rant for a completely different post and maybe even blog. Anyway, GA as I mentioned is completely free and very simple to install. After signing up for an account, you simply install a bit of tracking code on the pages you’d like to track and wait for the data to roll in. I tend to just stick the code in my footer template that way I’m sure I track traffic on every single page. Also, by having it in the footer, GA won’t ever effect the load time for the bulk of the page.
Whether you use GA or any of the other analytics programs available out there, the point is to use at least one. You’ll be able to find out what terms you’re getting traffic for from the search engines, you’ll see which posts or pages are most popular, you’ll find new sites that link to you or have talked about your site. If you sell a product or a service on your site you’ll be able to find out which ads are performing the best for you, which traffic sources you should focus on and which are just a waste of your time and money. Quite simply, you need it. If you don’t have an analytics program installed on your site, do it, and do it now. I promise you’ll thank me for it later.
Update: Two other cool analytics programs are Crazy Egg and Robot Replay (hat tip to SEO Scoop on this one)
Comments
Wild Bill July 28th, 2007
I installed a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics, but it does not seem to work. I guess I need to stop procrastinating and add the code manually. Thanks for reminding me.
Blogging Experiment July 28th, 2007
Bill, you definitely should. It isn’t hard at all and gives you a wealth of information.
The Duck August 27th, 2007
I completely agree with this (and most other things of yours I’ve read so far). I personally use Statcounter.com, and it works great for me. It’s also free. I generally love the Google-branded products so I may check out GA to see if they do anything different or better than statcounter.
Thanks!
Hamilton January 15th, 2008
Great idea to put the analytics code in the footer! As my posts include more graphics and complex layouts, the home page load is slowing down. Moving analytics out of the way should help.