If you are a blogger then you would know how hard it is to get traffic to your website when nobody knows about you. You write posts day in and day out and keep checking your Alexa rankings to know how well you are doing. But if you are not using analytics then it is very unlikely that things will change quickly for you.
You may be tracking your website performance through AWstats in your Cpanel but somehow it does not show the actual and detailed picture of your website performance. Google Analytics is probably the best free tool available today and it has so much to offer you. It tells you exactly what your visitors are looking for on your website and where you need to improve. It also shows the most popular pages of your website and the keywords people type to get to your website. All these things make it easier for you to optimize your content.
You can register for a free account at Google Analytics website if you already have a gmail address. There you can add your website and get a code for it. Put this code in the <body> section of your page’s HTML. Ideally the code should be at the bottom of the HTML before the closing <body> tag.
Google Analytics WordPress Plugin
WordPress is the most used CMS today and there is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that you can use to monitor your website. There is a lot of data available and you need to know how to interpret it and make it meaningful for your blog.
Google Analytics Compared to Google Keyword Tool
These two tools are very useful but are very different from each other. Google Keyword Tool is good for keyword research but it gives you raw keywords and monthly searches of keywords you are looking for but Google Analytics shows you keywords that are crucial to your website and hence help you in optimizing your content. SEO in blogging is not an easy task as you write on very diverse topics but with the help of analytics you will at least have a direction to do SEO.
About Usman
I don’t think you can actually compare Analytic and the Keyword tool because they serve two different purposes. But both are definitely important in blogging.
Yes, these two are very different but I have seen people consider them as same and people take keywords in analytics as suitable keywords for their website and do not do keyword research through Google Keyword Tool.
Hello Usman.
I believe analytics is VERY important. However, I have seen that AW and Ga is not the same in their results. Ga is registers about 10% of what Ga shows. Do you know why this is?
Yes, I think the reason is that AWstats records the visitor as soon as a visitor lands on our website and AW is on our server whereas GA records the visitor only when analytics code is loaded and most of the visitors do not wait for the analytics code to load and exit the page. This is why we see huge difference in both these stats.
I’d say that if your goal is money making then yes I’d agree!
GA has the cleanest and the most comprehensive interface out of all the traffic stat services out there. The adsense integration is icing on the cake.
Google needs to improve more in analytic bcz i found some other analytic providers are good and user friendly then google, like performancing etc.
I use Google Analytics on conjunction with other stats packages as each one provides different information that I find useful. I also like the other stats packages since they seem to provide more instant stats than Google’s.
Still, Analytics is the most comprehensive of the stats packages and Google seems to be updating/adding more features faster than the others. It is also the defacto standard for stats packages online.
I recommend KISSmetrics to my clients who really mean business. As I said Google Analytics is the best FREE tool and not “the best” tool available today.
I don’t think its necessary if you are still starting to be a blogger. Google tools are great like the analytics but it also serve as the Google’s spy to look at your blog. If you are messing around(still learning the ropes) in your first quarter and you installed analytics a week after you’ve created your blog, you are busted. That’s only my opinion. We must understand that Google are using those tools to help them collect signals over the internet.
I really like this blog post, it has some great info. Thank you and keep up good work
Thanks! Keep coming back for more useful information and please do contribute some ideas if you have as they are beneficial for all