Tracking and Analyzing your Website's Growth
One of the most important pieces of information a web administrator needs to know is who visits their site. Long ago, webmasters were forced to read through complex access logs to see what people were doing. With the rise of Web 2.0 and pay per click advertising however, knowing as much as you can about the people who view your site is becoming much more important than in years past.
There are hundreds of services, with more springing up every month. How can you tell them apart from each other?
Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind when choosing a service:
Decide what features you need
Generally you will find three types of products, with each getting more advanced and feature filled as you go down the line.
The first is just a simple counter that increases every time a page is viewed. This is more of a novelty than serving a real purpose. There is no real need to limit yourself in this way, so go with one of the other two methods instead.
The second is similar to the first, except more information is gathered such as the name of the page that was viewed, the time it was viewed, and any links that were clicked while on the page.
The last is what is refered to as "Web Analytics Software". Services that fall under this category track everything from the browser a person is using, to the country that they live in. Many of them also offer graphs and maps of a site's data. Examples of these graphs can be seen below.
This type of functionality can be useful to view trends in the data that is collected. With this information you can focus on the areas that give you the most traffic and focus your efforts towards them in the future.
Choose between a free or paid service
This decision may be harder to make than you think. Although there are plenty of free sites that do just as much as commercial ones, you might find a special feature that can only be found with a paid service. Do not limit yourself to free sites just because you do not want to spend some money.
Mint is the best commercial analytics script I have come across. Once you see the user interface I am sure you will agree with me. It differs from the others because it must be installed alongside your site instead of by inserting a couple lines of code on a page. This means that the information it collects can be automatically backed up if necessary.
A usable demo can be found here:
http://haveamint.com/about/demo
Check out its features here:
http://haveamint.com/about/feature_highlights
If the idea of shelling out cash sends shivers down your spine, sign up for Google Analytics. If you are looking for features, Google Analytics has you covered. One downside of Google Analytics is that the stats only update about every 24 hours. If you want to be able to monitor data in real time, use another service.
Reinvigorate was recently reopened after being closed for several years. It is currently in beta and can be compared to Mint in terms of UI design and general layout.
One unique feature of Reinvigorate is an application named Snoop. Snoop is a program that runs in the background and informs you whenever someone visits your website. It can even play a sound depending on the action a person made.
Lastly, we have W3Counter. I have not used it, but it appears to be a cross between the features of Google Analytics and the clean layout of Mint. They offer free tracking of up to 5,000 page views per day for one site and 25,000 hits for the "Pro" version, which increases the amount of sites you can track to ten.
A demo is available here:
http://www.w3counter.com/stats/2
What to avoid
Be suspicious of scripts that require advertisements to be displayed along with the counter. These sites usually care more about making money than the services they provide. This does not mean you should completely avoid them, but attempt to find an alternative if possible.
Add the tracking code to your site
After choosing a service, place the code on the pages of your site you want to track and watch as data is collected. It may take several hours for the information to display on the charts, but this varies from service to service.
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