Monday, October 13, 2008Google Analytics
One of the coolest new free tools that I've come across is Google Analytics. It's very simple to install; you place a script tag at the bottom of every page that you want tracked that adds ~ 10kb to the page. It also provides a wealth of information about the users of your site.
Signing up for Google is simple, you can use your own e-mail address and it takes about 3 minutes to complete. Once you are signed up, you register your site, copy and paste the tracking code, and wait for the Google bot to verify the code on your site. After a day, you will begin to see results.
The website traffic is displayed over a month's time by default, but you can change the view to day, week, or year or even a custom start and end time. During the time chosen, you can view the number of users to your site, the link that directed here, where they are from geographically, the average time on your site, and other userful information. After six months of using the website, I'm still finding new features.
I'd recommend Google Analytics to anyone who is interested in website statistics especially since it has more functionality than most paid statistics programs.