Free Website Statistics From Google

Yet again Google has jumped to the front of the line in a service they offer. With Google Analytics webmasters can get detailed statistics about web traffic with a simple Javascript include in the header section of their pages. In the case of most of my dynamic sites, this was accomplished by simple placing this Javascript include in a single file. The truly wild fact about this service is that they used to charge a nice chunk of change for it before the decision to give it away for free. They may have a plan for introducing value add services for a fee in the future, but the free data now is quite nice.

It was slow getting initial traffic reports at first (I started using this during the initial crunch of new users), but after a few days of data, I find it well worth the initial wait. Data, data, data… from a variety of perspectives. You can view data from an executive’s perspective, a webmaster, or a marketing perspective.

One quick look at the executive overview provided a glimpse of my traffic that I’ve not really concerned myself with in the past. Four flash reports - uniques vs. pageviews (I have paid attention to this often in the past), new users vs. return users, geographic map of users, and a breakdown of visits by source - greet you on this high-level overview. If for information purposes only, I find it valuable to look at your data this way.

Drilling down deeper in to the reports you will find tons of data that can be extremely useful in your ongoing search engine optimization efforts. After my limited use so far, I’d say that Google hit at least a double with this service, and is trying for a triple. As I dig further with more historical data, I’ll see if they are trying for an inside the park homerun!