Analyze this
June 16th, 2006
Finally… After several months, my google analytics invitation has arrived.
Does it offer more than any ‘usual’ page statistics tool that can be found on the net?
Short answer: absolutely! For the detailed analysis of analytics read on…
My site is hosted at dreamhost, and they offer a pre-installed logfile analyser, analog, which claims to be ‘The most popular logfile analyser in the world’. It has a decent feature set (not too much graphical fancy stuff, but nice analysis nevertheless), still i wanted to give a try to something different, too - so i have installed statcounter, ‘A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats’.
I have been quite satisfied with both statistics (although in the free version of statcounter, the log size is limited to 100 hits) - until i have seen what google analytics is capable of.
The number of features that google analytics has to offer is HUGE. I am using it for a week now, and there are still some statistics which i simply did not have time to look at. There are quick overview screens for everything important (above you can see one of them) - and if you would like to drill down to every single hit, you have the possibility too.
Ever wanted to know everything about your visitors? No problem. You can view every single visititor’s referral link, which country/city did he come from (also displayed on the world map), connection speed, platform, browser, screen resolution (even color depth!), language, which keywords did lead them to you, their loyalty, conversion rate (i have listed just a small fraction of featues)… and all this presented with nice graphs, charts etc. Simply unbelievable.
I will not write anything more about this tool, since if you have it, you know what i am talking about, and if not, go and get it if you are interested in your web site stats!
My advice is: forget about ANY kind of stat counter, and request a google analytics account ASAP.
tags:News Web2.0