Tracking your website traffic: Google Analytics & WordPress.com Stats
Just until recently (before starting project WebMoney) I was a huge fan of Webalizer - an online log tool analysis tool written in C. Don’t get me wrong, I still am, but as it turns out my webhoster has been using the same webalizer version for the past 6,5 years. This is not the fault of my webhoster though, there just hasn’t been an update for webalizer until recently. But just the fact that I’m relying on a traffic and visitor analysis tool that is based on technology from several years back made me wonder and I decided to have a look at alternatives.
Of course I had heard of Google Analytics before. Especially this summer there were some reports about Google collecting data of almost 80% of the entire German web traffic and some well visited and famous German websites publicly declared not to use Google Analytics any more. Well, I’m not getting that much traffic yet and also I’m curious about what the guys at Google invented here again so I wanted to give it a try. The signup process at their page is quick and easy. You have to include some Javascript code before your <body> tag on every site (so if you are using a blog or CMS include this in your template files) to start tracking your visitors. Important note: Include the code in your error page template as well! When you have done this Google will check whether your code was insereted correctly and if so it says “Receiving Data” for your website.
When you click on the first report you’ll immediately notice: this isn’t Webalizer anymore - this is much powerful. The dashboard includes the most important reports from three areas. The first one is visitors: visitors to your website, page views, pages per visit, average time on site and two really cool metrics: bounce rate and new visits. The bounce rate tells you how many visitors left your website on the page that was their entry page, i.e. didn’t surf around on any link (which they should if your site is sticky). New visits tells you how much of your traffic is from existing, loyal visitors and how much new traffic you are driving to your website. Just a note: If you are unsure what any of those metrics mean just click “About this Report” on the left side bar and it gives you a short explanation.
The second area of reports is traffic sources: here you’ll find out where your visitors are coming from. Either from search engines, other links on websites or directly. With visitors from search engines the specific search engine and the keywords that were searched for are shown.
The third main area is “Content” which shows you what are the most visited pages on your website. It also has a cool feature called “Site Overlay” where you can view your website and Google shows you the percentage values for every link on your site. This tells you what the most clicked links are and which are not so important.
By the way - those reports I have mentioned are just the beginning. There are other cool features such as benchmarking with other sites, getting details on software and hardware (screen resolution) used for browsing and much more.
One last thing I would like to point out with Google Analytics is the possibilty to define Goals. Goals are certain actions that you want your website visitors to do - e.g. register, order something etc. You can define goals by some meta information or by the URL of the goal page, i.e. that is the page your visitor ends at when he reached the goal. You can also define a funnel path, that allows you to monitor certain steps a user has to take in order to reach a goal (e.g. register page 1, 2, 3 etc.). Goals are excellent to measure your conversion rates and see how your website performs with getting users where you want them to be.
If you don’t want to use just another Google service or don’t need all this wealth of reports there is another alternative: WordPress.com Stats. You can use this if you have a WordPress blog for free. It loads an image (not the small smily on the bottom of this page…) and generates some statistics out of this. It is much simpler than Google Analytics but the basic functionality: tracking the number of visitors, where the come from and what the view is there.