Since the early days of the web, reviewing web traffic reports has been incredibly important to anyone with an online presence.
“Back in the day,” as they say, I used to own and operate Screensaver.com, which I started from ground zero and grew to be the #1 most popular screensaver download site in the world. And back in 90′s and early 2000′s that was saying a lot, because screensavers were the single most popular category of download online after games. We were serving 10 million page views monthly back when that was crazy huge traffic. (It’s still not too shabby, but the total audience was orders of magnitude smaller back then). And traffic stats were crucial to that success.
By analyzing where traffic was coming from and what keywords were being used, we could work on increasing our traffic by better targetting our keywords and focusing efforts on the best sources of traffic. And by reviewing the most (and least) popular pages, paths through the site, and more, we were able to optimize content and make adjustments to maximize visitor experience, and more. Sort of like… the things we still do today. (I suppose it’s nice to know that some things don’t change!)
Without web analytics we’re all just guessing and flailing in the dark. But put metrics to the traffic, and magic happens!
Back in the early days of the web, this was achieved by installing software that would parse through web server log files and keep track of and tally a bazillion different variables, numbers, counters, IP addresses, users and statical points, in order to derive meaning from the seemingly endless reams of data. Personally, I used the “Grandaddy” of reporting tools: Web Trends.
But said Grandaddy came at a premium. Over time other competitors emerged that were every bit as capable, but less costly, and I’ve tried most of them at one time or another.
I remember some entirely web-based reporting systems trying to gain traction as far back as 1996. But they were fraught with many problems and issues. And mainly, I didn’t trust them. Even Web Trends jumped into the scene with “Web Trends Live”. Sure, it was cool in theory, but I refused to put their advertising badges on my web site (I’m running a professional site, not a stock car racer with various sponor logos splashed everywhere). And right off the bat there were latency problems — nothing like waiting and waiting for pages to finish loading, just to realize it’s the reporting software slowing it down! Speed and connectivity issues also contributed to missed reporting, and what good is reporting metrics if they’re wrong?! So went the concept of real-time reporting. Neat in concept, but not robust enough. A concept before its time.
Now mind you, Google Analytics has been out for a while. This isn’t “news.” I gave it a quick look at first, but it was pretty basic and I was still dubious from earlier experiences.
About two years ago I gave another hard look to Google Analytics and decided to dip my toe into the water and give it a test. It went well. I gravitated towards using it more and more. Today, I no longer run reporting software on any of my web servers — all of my reporting is driven by Google Analytics.
Over time, Google has managed to solve the major issues that bothered me. Due to their sheer volume and wealth, they’ve been able to plow hundreds of millions of dollars per year into their software and hardware infrastructure. They spend tens of millions of dollars per year just focused on improving speed and reducing latency, building scale and deploying physical redundancy among its servers, data centers and networking infrastructure. Just retrieving search results from the entire web universe instantly when you hit <ENTER> wasn’t good enough — now they predict what you want and pull results in real time as you are still typing it!
This level of speed, efficiency and connectedness has been brought to bear with Google Analytics. Oh, and like its namesake search engine, it’s free.
Signup at www.google.com/analytics and you’re off and running in minutes. You can enter as many different web sites as you want to track, all under your one login, and you can even invite other people to have access to your stats on a site by site (i.e. case by case) basis, such as bringing in other members of your team, or your web master, etc. Reporting is real-time, with nothing to install or maintain. And it’s a piece of cake to get up and running. In about 60 seconds you can create an account, setup a site to track and get the code swatch you need to paste into your web site pages (or to send to your webmaster to do it for you). And BAM! You’re off and running.
The toolset has really matured over the years. Google continues to integrate new features and enhance and expand the existing ones. It’s incredibly feature rich! When I casually mentioned it to one of my customers recently, he looked at me like I had two heads. He had never heard of it. So I thought it was time to share some details here.
When you login (after everything is all set up), you start off at a Dashboard that gives you the broad strokes. This is great for top-level Executive Management and to just quickly put a finger on the pulse. But then you can start drilling down deeper, and deeper, and deeper, as you wish. And if you are involved in buying AdWords, you can integrate your AdWords campaigns and track the entire process from end to end. You can view the entire process from its origins at Google search to click-through to your site and through to purchase and checkout! Google Analytics will generate reports on ROI metrics and more. It’s quite impressive. And of course, it’s 100% web-based so you can log in and review reports from anywhere on the Internet, at any time.
Did I mention it’s 100% free?
I wish WebTrends luck. I think they’re going to need it.
In the meantime, do yourself a favor and check out Google Analytics if you haven’t already. You’ll be glad that you did.
NOTE From the Editor: This was just a general opinion piece on Google Analytics. I’m currently drafting a detailed article about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which will delve deeper into these disciplines, and be a lot more “educational”. Stay tuned!
