December 11, 2007

How To Track Visitors - An Introduction To Google Analytics

There are many different ways of tracking your visitors. Far and away the best would be Google Analytics. When in doubt, go with google. The only partial drawback to using solely analytics is time–it updates around every couple of hours. If you are totally obsessed with instantly seeing when a visitor comes onto your site, there are two remedies. The first would be to generate a lot of traffic, because the more traffic you have, the more often Google Analytics updates. If you haven't much traffic, and you absolutely must see those visitors, then you can sign up for Statcounter. This program will show visitors within a minute of their coming onto your site. I would advise, though, against using only Statcounter, as it has some major drawbacks. It only stores up to 500 visitors before it starts deleting old records, and it's data displays aren't half as clean as Googles.

analytics homepage.png

A jumpstart introduction to Google Analytics if you're new to it. Once you've created an account, all you have to do is paste a little code into your template. If you're using blogger, simply go to your template, click 'Edit HTML' and paste the code into the bottom, just above the lowest <body> tag. Now you're ready to check out the interface.

Go to the reports for your site. You should automaticly be taken to your dashboard. There are a couple of different data displays on your dashboard. The first is a graph of the number of visitors you have. Naturally, if you just created the account, it will be at zero. Just above this display is a date window that can be dropped down. From here you can view traffic for a single day, or multiple days.

dashboard upper.png

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there are four different boxes, each representing a different aggregation of data. The "Map Overlay" and the "Traffic Sources Overview" are my personal favorites.

dashboard lower.png

If you want to see where your visitors are from, click the "view report" button in the "Map Overlay" box. This will take you to a new page with a wold map on it. The default display is the countries that the visitors are from, but I don't find this very useful. to change the view, scroll down a little bit until you see 'detail level' options. There should be a 'Continent', 'Sub Continent Region', 'Country/Territory', and my personal favorite, 'City'. Click on the City option, and the map should load a bunch of orange dots. These represent visitors, and the bigger they are, the more times that person has visited. If you roll your mouse over any of the dots, the name of the city will pop up on screen.

If you direct your attention to the navigation bar, you will see an option called 'Traffic Sources'. This is a handy view, and probably the most useful data collection. Click on it, and scroll to the bottom. Here you will see something that says 'Top Traffic Sources'. Underneath there will be a 'Sources' and a 'Keywords' header. Under the 'Sources' is a list of how many people have come through what sites or search engines. Under the 'Keywords' header you will see a list of the search terms that people have found you under (what they typed into the search engines and found you under).

And viola, there you have a simple introduction to the major features of Analytics. There are many more, so explore and experiment. But it's always nice to know how to find the basics.

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December 11, 2007

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