howto: enable metrics for analyzing your web traffic

Google Analytics is a free set of tools you can use to analyze your traffic. It's really intended for commercial web sites, but using it for your blog will help you understand who's visiting, from where, and how they found your site.

It's easy to get started. Go to their website and sign up. The site walks you through the steps you need to take. They provide a javascript snippet of code you place into your blog template. Once it's there, they collect information about your site and give you a variety of different methods to analyze the data. It's really that easy, and it's free!

Google Analytics has a blog of their own in which they discuss new tooling and tips. They also have case studies if you're curious how others use the data they make available to you.

I launched this new blog a little over two weeks ago. Just to give you an example of the type of information available,  as of yesterday, I've had 47 unique visitors from 42 cities in 13 countries. I can see which keywords brought them to my site. I can even see which browsers and operating systems they were using. For example, I've had five hits from four cities in Canada, and they were using three different browsers (Firefox, IE, and Safari) running Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I also know their screen resolutions, versions of Flash, and connection speed. I can sort this data by pie charts, bar charts, or percentages.

Why does any of this matter? Well, if you want to tune your site to attract and retain readers, information like this is invaluable. For now, I’m just curious who’s visiting, so I’m focusing more on which keywords are attracting traffic and where my readers are located. If I ever needed to take this to the next level and test various scenarios of text phrases, graphics, or layouts, I could do all of it with Google Analytics and see which combinations work best.

I highly recommend Google Analytics.

filed under: blog, google analytics