Site Traffic with Google Analytics

Posted on November 22, 2006
Filed Under Web Tools |

It struck me today that I don’t yet have any way of tracking whether anyone is visiting this weblog. So I set out to discover how to track (at a minimum) how many visitors there are to my site. Hopefully there will be more detailed infomation available. Also, I did not want to pay for this service.

I started out looking at the help pages of blogger.com figuring this must be a fairly common requirement and that blogger must offer at least a basic tool. Sure enough, I came across the following article which had a list of resources for Hit Counters and Statistics. The top of the list was Google Analytics.

So I surfed over to the Google Analytics home page. Here is some of the blurb from the front page.

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You’ll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.

This sounded like overkill for my simple blog but I was curious so I signed up (it was free after all). Once I had signed up I added the url of my weblog to my account. I had to copy a block of code into my weblog template in order for Analytics to start monitoring the traffic. However the process was relatively painless and in no time at all it was collecting statistics about traffic to my weblog.

As expected, it is much more than I needed, but it graphs the number of page hits over time, breaks the visits down by new and returning visitors, provides statistics on where the traffic is coming from and even where the visitors are geographically located. All very nice.

However, the bad news is that there is very little traffic so far (so little in fact that there was only one page visit I could not track back to either myself or one of my friends). But with the blog not even one week old and there having been no real effort to help people find the blog this was all to be expected.




Keep up to date with the latest articles at Monetize Your Blog. Subscribe via rss for free.

Related Articles


Comments

One Response to “Site Traffic with Google Analytics”

  1. Chris on December 9th, 2006 3:07 pm

    You might want to give Statcounter a try. More flexible & you can exclude hits from you & your friends if you so choose.

Leave a Reply