Monitoring Your Statistics – A New (and Free) Tool

To have a successful web site, you need to constantly monitor the statistics relative to the site. You need to know the number of hits various pages in your site are getting. You need to know how many sessions you are seeing each day, the number of visitors, the number of repeat visitors, how long they stay, on what page they enter the site. You also need to know what are the keyword phrases they use to get to your site, what search engines, what is the conversion rate, and what is the return-on- investment (ROI).

On of the more popular tools for getting statistics on a web site is the commercial Urchin tool. This is what I use for monitoring my own statistics. It used to cost $199 a month. My host provides it at $10 a month. What if I told you you can get it now for free?

Google purchased Urchin Software and has just announced the Google Analytics service. Instead of selling it for the $199 a month, they provide it free – it doesn’t cost a dime. Explore the service at:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

What does Google get by giving you this extraordinary service completely free? Very simple – they can watch your traffic, your sales, and better target your search results from that information. If you are willing to share this information with them, this tool is yours.

Once you have signed up for the tool, Google will give you a snippet of JavaScript code. This code has to be put on each page of your web site that you wish to monitor. That’s it.

If you wish to use the tool, you will find there is a bit of an overload. Google underestimated the number of people that would want to sign up. Be patient. Also remember that as you add new pages to your site, be sure to add the code snippet to them as well. In particular, it should be on the entrance page and any page that asks for conversion.

Google Analytics monitors the performance of your banner ads, sites that refer to you, e-mail newsletters, and both organic and paid search engines, so you can track how visitors were referred to your web site and what they do once they arrive at your site.

You can use the statistics that Google Analytics gathers with its reports and graphs to determine, for example, how effective your different ad campaigns are and how your should change your web site to improve sales conversions.

Google Analytics can monitor the usage of a site of any size, including the those of major corporations which are often visited hundreds of millions of times per week.

If you don’t want to share your data with Google, Google sells a Web analytics software package, called Urchin 5, which has fewer features than Google Analytics. Its base module costs $895. You can extend its functionality with optional modules.