An essential part of any search engine marketing campaign, I find, is to have accurate and up-to-date website statistics available. Not only does having this information tell me and my clients how the website is performing in an SEO context, but it also helps to map out how it should be promoted in the future.
What isn’t very helpful is when websites are hosted with 3rd party hosts who don’t update statistics frequently enough. For example, one of my clients has their website hosted by Register.com, a big name on the web, and yet their statistics (based upon Webalizer) are only updated on a monthly basis. Not only that, but they’re kept in a publicly accessible directory. Talk about stone age!
If I were stuck with that level of service then I’d be making changes very rapidly. Not being able to see the effect of changes on a daily basis means that I’d effectively be flying blind for the most part. By the time my statistics were updated, an opportunity could be lost.
I haven’t used Google Analytics (GA) up until now, but I have used Urchin before and found it to be very useful. I only stopped using Urchin when my hosts stopped providing it and then I switched to AWStats which is bundled with most cPanel-based hosting. In the case of this particular client, I’m going to explore the possibility of installing the GA software and being able to take advantage of this free software.
Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, website statistics, urchin, webalizer, awstats, hosting
Tracewatch is a good stats package, PHP based and runs on your own server, so JS disabled browsers will still register. I used to have it running to track spambots down, but was quite impressed with the stats it produced too. Oh it’s free
Thanks for the Tracewatch suggestion. It certainly looks like a comprehensive package.
Have you any experience with Google Analytics at all?
I’ve set it up on client sites but don’t use it personally. Too clunky and doesn’t get right to the point easily. I’m not saying it’s no good but you need to know where to look to get the info you’re after. Sure it’s pretty with it’s AJAX interface.
It’s worth a look with the free tag. But if you’re shopping around, I’d try a couple of differently powered ones to get a better representation.
I’ve installed Google Analytics as a first try and so far so good. Installation was a breeze with just a snippet of JavaScript to install on each page to be tracked and the reports look like they’ll be very informative (I’ve only just installed it so there’s no data yet). Best of all, all of the processing is done by Google and I can schedule emailed reports to go directly to my client.
