Introduction
Statcounter
Google Analytics
Sitemeter
Checking out your Weblogs
Introduction
In a world where the number of page hits equates to the amount of cash you can earn, you'll very quickly want to monitor your Web Traffic with some kind of a free tool. Later, you can upgrade to the premium version when traffic has grown but first, which are the free ones and which are best? The best sites offer lots of alaysis ranging from time spent on the site, number of unique visitors, popular pages, entry pages and so forth...
Statcounter
One of the very first thing all GooglePages users want to do know is
how many hits/ traffic is incoming. The tool of choice based on mails
I've seen about this, and is coincidentally the tool I am using is
StatCounter. You can get this free tool here. Of course,
you're asking - what's the catch... The answer is that it is a cut-down
version of the tool and you don't get the premium (pay-for) options
such as extra logging capacity. Believe me, for a new website out there
getting a few hundred hits per day, it is sufficient for your needs.
They also have a few ads on these pages which help them pay their way
like all other free tools.
For each project you are working on, you'll need to setup a Project.
So, in my case I have one for my Blog and one for my GooglePages, plus
I have a few other on the boil - so you can setup several projects.
StatCounter uses a wizard for each project and asks you a bunch of
questions which then ends up with some code which you will insert into
your GooglePages GPC.
GPC now supports Javascript so just follow the wizard and make your
choices. GPC does not use Frames in case you're wondering.
In terms of how do you actually add the code, in GPC click on the 'edit
html' link which is bottom left. Place the code at the bottom of the
html (this is my preferred location).
Alternatively, for an upload, place in the g_footer section of the
downloaded file within your WYISWGT editor of choice.
The user interface is really easy! Try it out. I'd highly recommend it.
It's what I'm using and many, many others...
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a much slicker product http://www.google.com/analytics/ and is part of the Google Product suite. It offers host of nice features which contains a dashboard. It is much more graphically oriented than the stacounter site but it takes a bit of getting used to in terms of what you're looking for. There's also a wizard for code generation.
Sitemeter
Sitemeter http://www.sitemeter.com/ requires a valid mail address and has a much simpler interface than Google Anayltics. I get weekly reports of my traffic in my mail box but it can be a little annoying at time to get so much mail. Sometimes it feels a little like spam instead of page counter stats.
Checking out your Weblogs
The more advanced services, most of which you'll pay a nominal fee for will provide your dashboard with some kind of log analyzer which is online. There are dozens of tools which analyze traffic from Web Server logs but this is mostly on the paid for services.
