Google Analytics
About one year ago Google launched their new ‘tool’ Google Analytics to the public, as always, there has been quite some critics about it. So far the most reviews have been pretty positive about it, but that isn’t too much of a surprise; Google can’t do anything wrong in the eyes of quite some people, everything they do is cool and modern…
But I haven’t had much trouble with it myself either, Google Analytics is one of the very few free traffic monitoring tools available that do not come with ads or popups, which is of course a pretty cool thing. It’s a little bit limited in it’s capabilities, though, the limit of 5 million pageviews wont be a big deal to the majority of the websites on the web. Besides that Google tries to make the tool as easy usable as possible, currently it’s available in ten major languages, even Dutch is available.
I’ve been using Google Analytics on another website, Otfans, for quite a while already. On that one I did manage to reach the limit of 5 million pageviews, sadly there isn’t much of an income coming from the website and the few ads we’re displaying, so buying AdWords advertisements in order to raise the limit wasn’t an option. (Anyone feels like advertising on a website with roughly 1200 unique visitors a day and a userbase of 30k with up to 10% active users?)
Luckely for me, I got an e-mail from Google some weeks ago stating that they had room on their servers again for another load of websites, so ever since then I’ve had their little javascript embed on this website, just as experiment, but it turned out fairly well. I’m quite amazed by the amount of visitors that come by here every day. I didn’t expect it to be more than one or two, perhaps a few more. The stats collected by Google gav a totally different view though, the visitors per day tops well over 50 every now and then, each of you reading an average of 2,53 page in the last week, pretty amazing!
A couple of screenshots of the (amazing!) statistics:
Apparently 30% of my visitors (of last week) came here by using Google
Search, sadly the statistics do not show what query they used, I’m
pretty curious about that.
It’s not really shocking to see most of my visitors are from Europe and the United States, but it’s cool to see I’ve had also a couple of visitors living in some quite exotic places, such as Honolulu, India and Japan!
Conclusion? I’m not really sure what to write here exactly but Google Analytics is a lovely toy for webmasters who’d like to see where their visitors come from (both digitally and geographically) and don’t get satisfied by the ‘boring’ statistics of applications such as AwStats or Webalizer, it’s got my recommendations for sure, even though you’ll have to be patient untill you’re invited, Google and their invitations…
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