Useful Site Statistics

One of the nice things about owning a website is seeing where all your visitors come from. But even better is to see how they got there and what they did when they arrived. You can also check which pages are popular, what keywords they used, where they landed in the site and so on.

Armed with this information you can update and target the information on your pages, maybe adjust Adwords or Adsense or just bask in knowledge of a job well done.

The way to discover the wealth of information about your visitors is to get hold of some site statistics. Here are a couple of freebies:

Google Analytics

The service offered by the search engine of choice by millions of surfers is called google analytics. According to their homepage:

‘Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how visitors found your site and how they interact with it. You will be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI and improve your site to convert more visitors.’

All you need to do is sign up and add a couple of lines of JavaScript to each page.

CrazyEgg

The crazyegg service is a little different. It won’t tell you anything about how somebody found the sites or even what they did, but it will tell you where they clicked. It shows which links they followed from each page in either a overlay or heatmap.

The free services only allows you track a couple of pages but the premium services have an excellent range of options.

Site Statistics

I have been using extreme tracking for some years now. As with all tracking services, you need to add a few lines of JavaScript to your pages but the depth of detail is quite amazing:

Number of visitors, where they come from, their OS and screen resolution, keywords, website referrers and so on.

The free service allows anyone to see your stats, the paid service keeps this secret and provides a lot more detail.

 

But Before you Analyze Anything

Of course you need some visitors to your site before you pour over the statistics but once you have a reasonable number then a bit of analyze can really make a difference to your click through rate.