Posted on April 23, 2008 by Ashleigh

When it comes to tracking your websites statistics – page views, unique visitors, traffic referrals and the like – you’ll find that the default tracking system that comes with your web host just won’t cut it. I’m looking at mine right now and it’s all over the place. According to the built in system, since the beginning of 2008, one of my websites has received 4,358 unique visitors over 130,905 visits and during that time 992,871 pages have been displayed.

As for where all these people came from.. I’m not really sure. The referring URLs are limited – if not non-existant – and in short, I don’t know how people found my website and what made them stay for over an hour, as 20% of the visitors do. It’s all well and good to display statistics and charts en masse and reel off boring information such as IP addresses (because of course I know where 88.208.16.48 is) and the fact that 90% of the visitors use an ‘unknown’ operating system (that helps me so much) but don’t you think there’s a limit on how much information is helpful?

If you’re a webmaster using a built-in website statistics program and are happy with that, by all means – keep using it if it works for you. For others that want to be made aware of the statistics that truly matter (in an aesthetically pleasing report like manner), I recommend switching to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website – including the keywords used to find the site, long lists of referral URLs, a map overlay section to see where visitors are viewing from and a number of summary features that are positioned on the dashboard to give you an overview without going into the 0’s and 1’s. Google Analytics can also be setup with Google Adsense (to track the revenue your website is making from advertisements) and Google Adwords (to give you an idea of which keywords in the PPC system are doing you good).

I stand by my recommendation and honestly believe Google Analytics to be one of the best website performance monitoring systems available. Considering you don’t have to pay a thing for it, in this case, the best things in life really are free. Well, except for cable TV, PCs, broadband, web hosting, electricity, cat food.. *cough*