Google Analytics

One of the latest tools to come out of the Google think-tank is Google Analytics: a tool to track and measure visitor statistics for a given website. With the help of a little script inserted into each page that you want to track, this tool is far more powerful than any of the tools that I have available to me on my hosting server. And combined with it’s integration to Google Adwords you can see pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about the visitors to your site, how effective your advertising is, how effective your site is in inviting visitors to delve further and even which links they use to navigate around your site.

Other handy features include: providing stats that segregate your visitors into browsers, platforms, languages, screen resolutions, etc. so that you know who you should be optimising your site for; showing which content has the most views (and therefore is the most valuable); reports that can be exported in various formats; and the list goes on.

One feature that I am particularly impressed with is the Site Overlay. This displays your site in a frame and under each link shows a little bar that indicates how many times it has been clicked, so you know exactly how effective your navigation is.

I’ve only been using Google Analytics for a couple of days, since I received my invitation code (it is so popular already that you have to ask to be invited to register) but already I can see just how powerful this tool is and how much it is going to pay off for me. Google Analytics is free if you have an Adwords account (and if you don’t, it’s also free if you have less than so many millions of visitors/impressions, I forget how many).

If you manage websites for yourself or others, check it out: www.google.com/analytics. 

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