The first thing you want to do is go about creating an account over at Google Analytics. Why would I want to do that, you ask? Well, in my own experience, the service provides a tremendous amount of data, has a great user interface, is easy to install on any website, and, more importantly, is completely free of charge. It’s undoubtedly the easiest, cheapest and fast way of getting your visitors’ information, including their IP address or hostname.

If you already use any of the Google services, you can easily sign in with your existing credentials. The process of setting up your website with Google couldn’t be easier. You will be prompted to create a profile. A profile is basically a metaphor for a folder, where you can keep track of various aspects of your websites’ traffic. Each different domain will have its own separate profile. Select ‘Add Profile for a new domain‘ and enter your domain’s address and timezone.

The next page will generate a bit of code that you’ll have to insert in the header or footer of your website’s template. You have to do this because you  want to keep track of visitors across your website, not just the homepage. This way, no matter where the user navigates to (eg. mysite.com/secondpage), you will know about the total time spent, the pageview/unique visitor ratio and exit funnels.

How you add the code to your website varies dramatically – and requires the knowledge to manually access and edit your theme files. You probably set your own website up, so you must know how to do this. If you don’t know how, don’t panic, and instead search Google for ‘[service type] + edit theme OR Google Analytics‘. For example, ‘Wordpress edit theme Google Analytics‘. There are plenty of guides out there that will show you how to add this bit of code.

In the latest version of the self-hosted Wordpress, I only need to click on ‘Appearance‘ in the sidebar, ‘Editor‘ and choose from the right side list ‘footer.php‘. As a golden rule, insert the code before the last ‘</body></html>’ tags. They’ve also got a lot of support material over at the help page, which you might want to check out if in doubt.

Twenty-four hours later and you’ve got the first taste of website statistics. Be prepared to spend the rest of the evening looking at various graphs of source locations, connection speed, ISP, browser capabilities, operating systems, browsers, time on site and more. After that, the only problem that could arise is that you’ll wish you could install a tracking code in your girlfriend, in order to be plot the ‘visitor loyalty’ chart.

If you want to view individual IP addresses of your website’s visitors you need to click on Visitors>Network Properties>Hostnames, from the right sidebar, as illustrated in the screenshot above. There you will see a list of IP addresses and how many times each has visited the website. This can prove useful if your site is being attacked (defaced, DDOS-ed, etc.), as you can determine who your attacker is, or at least his proxy.

More views and information is accessible through the sidebar on the right: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals. They’re pretty much self explanatory. The Visitors tab will contain information about – you’ve guessed it, the people who accessed your site. Traffic sources will identify who sent you traffic, be it a search engine, a referral or just organic. The Content tab will dutifully tell you how each page is doing when it comes to attracting eyeballs. Finally, Goals is used by e-commerce folks and companies to measure conversions, a fancy word for a sell.

You should definitely spare a minute to check out the quite extensive page of articles about blogging tools.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Su.pr – An Extraordinary URL Shortener from StumbleUpon (13)
• Is Your Wireless Network Safe? (9)
• How to Trace an IP Address to a PC & How to Find Your Own (25)
• Google Analytics Tips You Should Know About (13)
• Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About (17)

Who’s coming, who’s going, who’s subscribing? It’s a fun boost when there’s a spike in traffic, and lets you know when you’re doing something right.

But that’s just the fun part. Tracking your visitors can also be hugely useful – the more you understand who your visitors are, the better prepared you’ll be to give them the content they want, and keep them coming back for more.

For the most part, the standard application for all of this is Google Analytics – and with good reason. It’s a great, simple, and free program that provides you with a lot of useful information. But if you’re looking more real-time, detailed information about who’s coming to your site and what they’re doing, give Clicky a look.

Clicky is an alternative to Google Analytics and a real-time traffic analytics tool that couldn’t be easier to set up – just insert a bit of script into the header of your website, and you’re set to go! Clicky then tracks, down to the crazy and useful minutiae, what’s happening on your site.

Clicky tracks all the basics, right on the homepage for your site. The number of visitors, the pages they’re coming from, the pages they’re looking at, and how much time they’re spending on your site. I like, in particular, the “Actions” category, as it shows how many people are clicking around within the site, rather than just coming and going. One action means they come, they read, they leave – higher numbers mean more activity within the site.

On the “Visitors” tab of the (beautifully designed) site, it gets into the nitty-gritty. You can see the IP addresses of your visitors, what they searched for or clicked on to find you, and where in the world they are. Who’s coming and leaving? Who’s spending hours on your site?  How are people finding you? The visitors page answers all of that.

There are too many other ways to analyze traffic to name them all, so I’ll just name six: By country. By the page they view. By the page they view after leaving your site. By what they click or download within your site. By type of traffic (direct, social media, etc.). By Web browser (my own blog gets mostly Firefox users, interestingly enough).

Knowing your audience, what they like and don’t, and even what else they read and how they find you, is a critical tool in building your site. You can promote yourself in the right places and ways just by knowing where people might look for you, and even tailor content based on, say, what Web browser people use to view your site.

For a few dollars a month, Clicky offers a bunch of other features, most notably Twitter tracking – you can see who’s talking about you on Twitter and what they’re saying. In a world in which Twitter’s becoming a hugely viable marketing tool, Clicky does a great job of keeping tabs on activity surrounding your site on Twitter, as well as providing a bunch of other analysis tools.

The free version of Clicky (which I still use) is a fantastic alternative to Google Analytics, for the casual or power user. If nothing else, its real-time reporting gives you a better sense of what’s happening that Google Analytics does. It’s easy to sign up, easy to use, and fun to see what’s happening on your site, right now.

For other ways to analyze your site’s traffic, read “Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About” and Woopra.

How do you track who’s on your site? Let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Master Your Website Traffic Stats with BLVD Status (6)
• Google Analytics Tips You Should Know About (13)
• Get Click Heatmaps for Your Website with ClickHeat (8)
• 5 Top Statistical Site Traffic Trackers (11)
• Web Metrics 101 – What DO all these Terms Mean? (17)

The first couple of times this happened to me I thought ‘ah well, thus is the fickle nature of online readers’ and got on with things. I was using BlogPatrol at the time (steer clear of it) and began to get suspicious when the spikes/dips got bigger and more random. The final straw came when I checked my traffic for February 08 and found that it was vastly different to what I remembered. How can your February visitor numbers change after February is over?

There is a lot of unreliable traffic tracking software out there – actually I’d say you shouldn’t trust most of it.

Enter Google Analytics. Who better to track your site than a big reliable name, and the very people who will be crawling your page to determine your PageRank?!

The layout of Analytics can be a little daunting but once you master it you’ll never look back.

Here are six of the best resources, with some of the handiest Google Analytics tips out there, starting from the simplest and moving on to trickier stuff.

How To Use Google Analytics For Beginners by Mahalo

The perfect, no-nonsense step-by-step guide, aimed at absolute novices. That is, you’ll get tips on actually setting up a Google account and inserting the Analytics tracking code into your page, as well as advice about navigating the Analytics dashboard.

Mahalo’s guide will be particularly useful for new Wordpress users as it tells you exactly how and where to insert your code – that’s bound to be the hard part for a lot of newbies.

Steps 3, 4 and 5 are ‘Get an Overview of Your Site Performance’, ‘See How Your Site is Performing Daily and Hourly’ and ‘See Where Your Traffic is Coming From’, and helpful screenshots are provided.

Google Analytics For Beginners – How To Make The Most Of Your Traffic Reports by Flyte

This one doesn’t cover setup and it offers more of a personal touch – discover how to generate reports that are some of the ‘most useful’, in the author’s opinion. It’s pretty spot on: you’ll learn how to generate:

• A Visitors Overview report. See how much traffic you have, how many page views (as opposed to unique visitors), the average time spent on your site and your bounce rate (the percentage of people who only visit one page on your site before they ‘bounce’ somewhere else). See it all in one handy graph!

• A Traffic Sources Overview in graph form. See whether your visitors are coming from Referring Sites, whether they’re finding you on search engines or whether they’re referring themselves.

• A Referring Sites Overview in table form. See a list of the specific sites your visitors are coming from. For example. I use this to see how many people are coming to my blog from my MakeUseOf author page!

• Keywords Overview in table form. What keywords did your visitors enter into Google (and other search engines) in order to find you? Great for learning which keywords are useful to you.

• Flyte’s guide is written clearly and provides plenty of images – a really useful resource.

8 Useful Google Analyics Tips by Jatex’s Weblog

A little more advanced. This one is really neat – they provide simple code that lets you tinker with Analytics to get what you need.

For example, Tip 1 gives a line of generic code you can insert whenever you put an external link on your site. Say your blog has a link to a YouTube video- insert this code and Analytics will start tracking how many people are disappearing to go and view it!

Also learn how to:

• Exclude internal visitors from your reports using a filter
• Track full referred URL’s (because sometimes referring sites will append their general URL instead of a specific one ie. www.makeuseof.com instead of www.makeuseof.com/google-analytics-tips-you-should-know-about)
• Track eCommerce transactions and
• Track exact Adwords keywords!

Google Analytics Videos On The Web by The Official Google Analytics Blog

For the visual learner – Google’s very own Google Analytics video playlist! Find full-length videos on advanced Analytics techniques.

Get Google Analytics On Your iphone by Conor Darcy Dundalk

An iphone afficionado explains how to access Analytics data on your iphone using some handy software.

7 Analytics Plugins & Reports You Probably Didn’t Know About by Aimclear

Plugins that let you see data numbers instead of percentages, a ‘What’s Changed’ report that tells you which referring sites to keep your eye on, a device for integrating Analytics with Google Docs and much more.

If I have missed any other good Google Analytics tips, be sure to put the links in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Clicky – A Great Alternative To Google Analytics (13)
• View Your Website’s Visitors’ IP Address & Keep Statistics (14)
• Master Your Website Traffic Stats with BLVD Status (6)
• Get Click Heatmaps for Your Website with ClickHeat (8)
• Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About (17)

For this is a tribute to Dashboard – Mac’s solution to Konfabulator.

I’m going to list most of the widgets I use often and some which I think may come in handy for you. Not every widget may hit the right spot for everyone, but the thing about widgets is that there are just so many of them! So if I missed your favorite one, do tell me about them in the comments.

Here we go.

1. WeatherBug Widget

I feel that this is the most essential widget and definitely a must-have on your Dashboard. WeatherBug is more informative than the regular Weather widget in the sense that it provides details about wind velocity and direction; forecasts with Highs and Lows; and links to satellite images of your country of residence. I’m sure you would like to know that it’s probably going to rain before heading out for a picnic, wouldn’t you?

2. Dashalytics

Do you have a blog with Google Analytics installed? Then you must know what I’m talking about when you have to constantly log into your Analytics account just to check how many hits you’ve had today? Dashalytics does all this for you. It will show you the total number of visits, pageviews, percentage of new visits and other general visitor overview information. It will also show you the graph you have on your Analytics Dashboard.

3. Currency Converter

Especially for those of you who travel a lot or often have to deal with foreign currencies, this is an absolute must-have! It will convert between multiple currencies at the same time and you can keep adding as many currencies as you want on the table. Also, typing * performs an inverse conversion against all other currencies. I found this widget super handy while I was travelling around Europe.

4. Punk

On the lighter side of things, I use this widget to do a little research before I go off to the movies. Type in the name of the film, it connects to IMDB’s database and then returns with the rating of the movie. Quick and easy. I wonder how highly rated ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley‘ is. Hmm.

5. Countdownr

A simple countdown widget to help you count the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the next special event in your calendar. It allows you to set alarms and every event can recur daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Never again forget your anniversary, your partner’s birthday or your project deadline!

6. Twigget

Is Twitter your life? Are you an online-social-networking freak? There are a lot of alternatives for a Twitter desktop application, but there’s nothing that pleases me more than simplicity. Turn this widget on, sign in, and start twittering.

7. Abracadabra

Got files or folders to hide from others? I sometimes keep some folders away from prying eyes with this widget. It’s much easier than setting up a password-protected DMG. Just drag-and-drop the files and folders you want to hide into this widget, set a password and lock it. The file you dropped in the widget will now have disappeared from the original location! To restore the file, unlock the widget and choose what you want to release from the magic hat.

Learn how to do this manually on Windows here.

8. Snooze

I love to listen to music just before I go to bed. But its a chore for me to get up to turn off my Mac in the middle of the night. After I found this widget, my nights were undisturbed and it’s so easy to use. Enter the amount of time you would like your Mac to countdown before sleeping itself and it does the rest. Of course, you could use it for other reasons, for example, setting the sleep timer to correspond to the estimated time remaining of your downloads.

There are lots more useful and cool widgets out there. Although I would love to cover all of them, it’s close to impossible, unfortunately. Tell us your favorite widgets and how/why you use them.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time med student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future. He also manages a Mac news site, Macnifying.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 5 Free Tools to Add to your Mac Menu Bar (16)
• Klip The Web to Your Desktop With KlipFolio (3)
• How To Place Your Widgets On The Desktop [Mac] (8)
• GKrellM – System Monitor Tool with Tons of Great Plugins (11)
• 6 Cool FREE Widget Platforms for your PC (11)

I will walk you through the free basic tools that are essential to tracking your basic visitor stats, and then some more unusual, advanced tools that help you analyze your websites for free. So this post is really ideal for any wannabe web analysts out there who have a limited budget (i.e. zero).

The Free Basic Web Analytics Tools (Yep Free!)

1. Traffic Tracking Tool: Google Analytics

One of the best and most powerful free web analytics tools to track your website visitors is Google Analytics. Not only can you get all the basic metrics like pageviews and unique visitors, and trends for them over time, but you can set up goals so you can measure conversion rates (like for newsletter signups or products purchased). Another cool feature is the Site Overlay tool which enables you to see a visual breakdown of where visitors are going and clicking on your website. Its also very easy to put on your website – all you have to do is put a simple tag on each of your pages. No need for help from techy folks or your IT department.

2. Traffic Tracking Tool: Woopra

One of the newer free web analytics contenders (so new in fact that they are still in beta) is a tool called Woopra. This tracking tool is ideal for smaller websites, especially for blogs. Two of the cool features it has (that Google Analytics doesn’t offer) are real time visitor analysis (you can see where they came from, what page they are on, where they have been so far etc), and also a great built in chat tool, that allows you to popup messages to your visitors and actually talk to them – offer help, get feedback etc. Might be worth checking out, especially for those of you looking to try something different than the leading free Google Analytics tool.

3. Blog Feed Tracking Tool: Feedburner

For those of you that have a blog out there, you should be offering RSS (real simple syndication) feeds of your blog posts. This way, visitors don’t have to keep coming to your website to read your posts – they can read them via an online feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, or even read them in a daily email. This free tool, Feedburner, makes it easy to track who is subscribing to your posts via feed readers and email, and helps you learn what your most popular posts are. Go sign up!

Advanced Free Web Analytics Tools (Free means Zero Cost!)

4. Visual Visitor Analysis Tool: Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is great for people who don’t really like looking at numbers, and are more visual. Its basically a very advanced version of Google Analytics’ site overlay tool. It allows you to see EXACTLY where people are clicking on your website, and even shows you in the form of a heatmap. It’s great for helping you come up with ideas of what to change and test on your website (more about testing in an upcoming post). They have a basic free level of service for you to use and check out, plus more premium, paid versions.

5. Search Engine Analysis Tool: Enquisite

If you took out the Search Engine reports part of Google Analytics, and added in a lot more detailed reports regarding your regular search engine traffic (resulting from your SEO efforts) and your paid search engine clicks, then you pretty much have ‘Enquisite‘ in a nutshell. It is a very useful free tool for those of you who spend considerable time and resources regarding attracting website visitors from search engines.

6. Survey Tool: 4Q

One of the best ways to understand what is happening at your website is to ask your visitors questions in the form of a web survey. You should never just rely on visitor statistics. These question answers tell you ‘why’ your visitors are doing the ‘what’ that you see in your website tracking stats, and enable you to get ideas for improving your website, thus improving the visitor experience, increasing the chance of them coming back. This new tool called 4Q is free and easy to set up and start generating good feedback.

7. Recording Tool: ClickTale

ClickTale takes visual analysis tools to another level, and enables you to record and watch what your website visitors do! You can watch what your website visitors do on your website from their own perspective. Its great for understanding where they go and what troubles they are having. And it only requires a few simple lines of code to be added to your pages! Amazing huh? The free version allows up to 100 recordings a week – more than enough to get started with! Intriguing stuff! Here is a sample of one such recording.

So there we have it – a pretty long list of free analytics tools for you to check out and start playing with – lots of nerdy fun to be had, I assure you! And it just goes to show, you don’t always have to pay to get great tools!

Written by Rich Page, A web fanatic, and owner of Rich Page Ramblings blog – full of cool website reviews and web analytics insight.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• 7 Reasons Why your Website Won’t Last Without Analytics (5)
• Web Metrics 101 – What DO all these Terms Mean? (17)
• View Your Website’s Visitors’ IP Address & Keep Statistics (14)
• I Make Use Of: Must-have Tools for Webmasters (8)
• Google Analytics Tips You Should Know About (13)

1. You Won’t Be Able to Compare the Quality of Your Traffic Sources

Go ahead, keep throwing away money on banner ads and Google Adwords, hoping that some of your traffic will stick. If you don’t analyze the bounce rate or the average time spent of all your different traffic sources, you won’t know what source you should be spending most money on. Who knows, maybe that blog you were advertising on actually is the best traffic after all!

2. You Won’t Know Where Your Visitors Are Going On Your Website

Most website owners design their site expecting visitors to go down a particular path – but all too often visitors take a completely different, unintended path. Without looking at most popular site paths and navigation summaries, you will be in the dark for where your website visitors go, just like your website visitors will be when they arrive on your website.

3. You Won’t Know The Pages that Your Visitors Think Suck

Maybe you think you wrote some great content. But maybe you aren’t sure. An easy way to see how popular each of your pages is to look at the exit rates and bounce rates for them all. Pages with high exit rates and high bounce rates (visitors that enter on a page, and then go no further) indicate poor content – get improving!

4. You Won’t Know if Your Content Keeps Visitors Coming Back

One of the most important things for any website to do is to keep visitors coming back. Otherwise, you have wasted your chance – website visitors are fickle things! Comparing new vs. repeat visits tells you exactly how often people are coming back. If your traffic gets 99% new traffic, chances are your website doesn’t make people want to come back. Time for a rethink!

5. You Won’t Be Able to Measure How Well Your Website Converts

So, you may have a free e-book, or get people to sign up for a newsletter. If you don’t set up funnels and conversion goals for the key goal of your website, you won’t know how well your pages are converting, and where people are leaving to during key registration pages. Maybe you need to take off that navigation on those pages after all…

6. You Won’t Be Able to See How Your Website Fares Over Time

Simple one. If your unique visitors and page views are declining over time, chances are that you need to re-think your website strategy and marketing. Keep comparing these metrics overtime, particularly on a month to month basis. If they are going up, keep up the great work!

7. You Will Have to Rely on Guessing For Website Improvements

This is one of the most important reasons to use a web analytics tool. Without looking at ‘what’ visitors are doing on your website, you won’t know what needs improving – like what pages are making people leave or where people aren’t clicking where you want them to click. Use all this information to improve your website, and then do further analysis based on those changes. Watch your repeat visits improve and pageviews increase!

These are many of the reasons that many of the big websites like pets.com failed back in the dot com boom of the late 90’s (remember their dog sock puppet?). They just threw millions of dollars at building a website and then marketing it, without actually understanding what the visitors were doing once they got to the website, and whether they even came back. If only they had better web analytics tools and better web analysts back then!

For those of you who don’t have a web analytics tool on their site, Google Analytics is a great place to start. It shows you all the great information and metrics I mention above, and is really easy to set up. Stay tuned for more on posts from me about Google Analytics best practices too. Anyway. Hope you enjoyed my first post on this website.

Written by Rich Page, A web fanatic, and owner of Rich Page Ramblings blog – full of cool website reviews and web analytics insight.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About (17)
• Web Metrics 101 – What DO all these Terms Mean? (17)
• View Your Website’s Visitors’ IP Address & Keep Statistics (14)
• I Make Use Of: Must-have Tools for Webmasters (8)
• Google Analytics Tips You Should Know About (13)

In my opinion, one of the best programs to be produced recently is the Adobe AIR platform which is being used to make some really visually powerful desktop applications. I was first introduced to Adobe AIR when I downloaded the desktop Pownce application and ever since then, I have heard nothing but praise from other bloggers about what fantastic software development opportunities Adobe has opened up.

In our recent roudnup of desktop apps for bloggers there was one Adobe AIR powered tool too. Called Google Analytics AIR Beta, this one shows you (as the name of the app suggests) your Google Analytics statistics and takes away the need to visit the Analytics website. You can just load up this small desktop app and it very quickly collects the information for you enclosed within an aesthetically-pleasing interface.

But as always with programs like this, you have to give the software app your Google account password and some people may find this unacceptable. I on the other hand am inclined to trust the application. I find it tedious to go to the Analytics website and continually type in my password every time. This program keeps your password in a website profile and all you have to do is click on the profile for the website you want to analyse. The stats will then instantly load up.

You get all the features that you would normally expect to find on the regular Analytics site and all of the information is exportable as a downloadable PDF / Excel / XML file :

I get the feeling that I will be checking my Analytics data a lot more in the future.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Clicky – A Great Alternative To Google Analytics (13)
• Write & Develop HTML Offline with First Page (12)
• Wordpress.tv – The Best Wordpress Tutorials Ever! (9)
• Wordpress Exploit Scanner Helps Administrators Scan Their Database For Malicious Files (10)
• Web Metrics 101 – What DO all these Terms Mean? (17)