Google Analytics
October 16, 2007
By now, everyone with a blog knows about Google AdSense, but do you know about Google Analytics?
It’s free and pretty fast to sign up. If you’re running more than one blog, you can tie all your accounts together to compare stats. When you sign up, you get a snippet of Analytics code to add to your blog’s main page (cut and paste, if you’d prefer not to tinker with your site’s code).
In about 2 days you can see not just how many hits you’re getting, but all about your visitors. You can see who’s a new visitor and who’s returning, where they’re from physically, how long they spent on your blog, and how they found you. Knowing how your visitors interact with your page, instead of just seeing a hit count, can help you tailor your site to increase your readership.
The best part is the ability to see what search terms led new visitors to your blog. It’s funny to see the random search terms people have used to find your site, and it also helps to find working keywords for your next article.
