Analyzing Your Site Traffic

For a while now I've been using the free Google tools and have been promising reviews as I go. Today I'd like to talk a little about Google Analytics. Previously I've used WebTrends in the corporate environment as well as tools such as WebLog Expert for smaller personal sites.

Analytics is free after registration of a Google account and works by embedding a very small piece of JavaScript at the bottom of your page. The script has a unique identifier that identifies the site as belonging to your profile and each and every time the page is loaded the script makes a call to a collection sever and transfers the 'log' information.

The reports are quite good and allow for real time reporting as well as custom date ranges similar to the way WebTrends does. The advantage of this type of collection is that logs do not have to be downloaded and processed and allow for viewing anywhere, anytime.

Additionally the reports can be made viewable to other Google account holders if there is another group interested in monitoring the growth and usage of the site.

While there are numerous options available for log analysis, some much better, I find that the Analytics implementation addresses 90% of my reporting requirements, and for the price you can't go wrong.


Trevor Matthews
http://www.tdmatthews.com
http://www.tdmhost.com