Analytics on Your Website

Before the Internet, businesses could keep track of customers very easily; they would walk in the front door and shake the owner’s hand.  But in the modern online marketplace it’s a virtual impossibility to tell who visited your site, how and why they got there and which products or services attracted their interest without some sort of tracking system.

That’s where analytics come in.  Functioning like an online inventory system, analytics programs allow to you gather a wide range of information on every visitor to your site.  And since the majority of analytics programs are free and open to the public, there’s no reason why every website today shouldn’t employ some sort of analytical tracking method.

Here are the five most important tools that I use on a daily basis to track websites for our clients:

1. Google Analytics – A free service, Google Analytics is the real workhorse of analytics tools.  By far the most commonly used service, Google Analytics gives you click data on basic metrics – page views, unique viewers, and referral information.  It organizes it all in a layered fashion – you start with top-level dimensions and you can dig down according to whatever metrics you want to look at.  It also creates charts and graphs automatically and integrates easily with Google AdWords accounts for streamlined administration of your online marketing tactics.
2. Mint – While Google Analytics is based on dimensions such as pages, locations and referrals; Mint is real-time tracking – the Twitter of analytics.  Mint offers “Peppers,” plugins that allow you to really customize the way you track things on your site.  Google Analytics has an API, however useful plugins and third party apps are somewhat lacking at this point besides JuiceAnalytics.
3. AWStats – Free, open-source tool installed on our server that analyzes data based on the server log files.  Since AWStats is installed on the server level, it automatically tracks any websites operating off of that server, making it more reliable than Google Analytics, which is based on a JavaScript tracker that sends information based on user interaction.  While Google Analytics offers more robust information, AWStats offers reliable data to compare GA against.
4. Google Webmaster Tools- Much like we use AWStats to bounce numbers off of to get the most accurate information possible, Google Webmaster Tools helps us more faithfully understand traffic sources and other important data about the site.  These tools allow you to look at:
   • Search engine data – where did your site show up on the search results page, and is it worth it to pursue SEO if you’re already getting plenty of clicks in the fifth position front page?
   • Traffic sources – which pages have the most inbound links?
   • Most common keywords – what is Google currently associating your site with?
   • Page Load Time (part of the experimental “Labs” section) – how quickly/slowly the site is loading.  Are slow loading times becoming a problem?  This will become a bigger issue as Google begins to roll out their algorithm that uses page load time to determine placement.
5. My Brain – All of these tools are great and useful, but you need to be able to take a step back, analyze all the data and make an executive decision about how you want to proceed. A computer that can spot the most essential data for your particular set of needs and goals or personalize the overall image and usability of your site using analytic data hasn’t been invented. For that, you need your brain.