Analytics for your Blog

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Web Analytics as defined at Wikipedia is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.

Data collected almost always includes web traffic reports. It may also include e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience response.

The simplest way to analyze the traffic patterns is by looking at your web server logs. This can be a fairly tedious task though. There are various tools available that can simplify this task. Most of them require you to embed a small piece of JavaScript code on your pages. Given below are some of the popular analytics tools available currently. This is not a comprehensive list by any means.

Google Analytics
Google purchased a company called Urchin in 2005 and this went on to become Google Analytics. GA is available for free and provides an extensive toolkit to analyze your web traffic. I personally use GA on this blog and many other sites that I run. The power comes from its ease of use and the power to drill down to the details that you are interested in.

GA does not require you to put any badge on your site claiming that you’re using their service. All you need to do is to embed a small piece of JavaScript on your site.

URL: http://www.google.com/analytics/

StatCounter
StatCounter is another popular analytics software that does not require you to put an image/icon on your site. All you do is to embed a small JavaScript code like Google Analytics. They provide a free as well as a paid service depending on your website traffic.

StatCounter provides drill down functionality for many of its reports.

URL: http://www.statcounter.com/

MyBlogLog
If you have a blog, you must have heard of MyBlogLog! Its a great social networking site for bloggers. You can see one of their widgets running on the sidebar of this blog. MyBlogLog provides statistical reports for bloggers. This comes in two variants — Free and Pro. The statistics are text based, at least for the free version. The Pro version costs $3 per month or $25 for a year.

URL: http://www.mybloglog.com/

Get Clicky
Get Clicky is a Web 2.0 analytics tool. The interface is very slick and they have a cool demo of what the software is capable of doing. This was really impressive but the downside is their pricing. Quoting the price from their site:

• Basic - Free, up to 3 sites, up to 1,000 average daily page views per site. Limited feature set.
• Blogger - $2.99/month or $19.99/year. Up to 3 sites and 10,000 average daily page views total (between all sites). Includes extra features like RSS feeds, Spy, outbound link tracking, download tracking, IP tagging, IP filtering, and more.
• Pro / Small business - $5.99/month or $49.99/year. Up to 10 sites and 50,000 average daily page views total. Includes all features from ‘Blogger’ plan, plus full custom data tracking (usernames, etc), SSL support, full API access, and data export.

URL: http://getclicky.com/

Performancing Metrics has licensed the GetClicky software and provides the same to their users as an integrated tool on their site.

Site Meter
Site Meter comes in two editions. A Free version and a Premium version that starts at $6.95/month. The pricing details for the premium version is shown below:

The free version of SiteMeter requires you to show a small image on your site unlike other services.URL: http://www.sitemeter.com/

AWStats
AWStats is an open source software that runs on your web server and analyzes your server logs. You don’t need to embed any code on your pages. This is a basic tool that will provide you will data which is primarily textual in nature. It does throw in some basic bar graphs though.

URL: http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Mint
Mint is a Web 2.0 analytics tool that is self hosted and costs $30 per site license. The interface is very impressive and uses shades of green throughout. The pricing was quite prohibitive for me to look into this in detail.

URL: http://www.haveamint.com/

HiStats
HiStats provides some cool looking graphs!! You need to embed a small image counter on your site for tracking purposes.  They have an “invisible” counter as well. They have over 200 counters to choose from. Their service is free and real time, but provides detailed statistics for the last 1000 visits only.

URL: http://www.histats.com/

Also, check out the following websites which I have not covered in this article:

• Reinvigorate

Credits: This article was inspired by a wonderful discussion at BlogCatalog on this topic.