4by12

Google Analytics

I signed up for Google Analytics a while ago and received an invitation about a week ago. It’s a free service from Google for web site owners that allows you to get detailed statistics about your site. After you sign up, you get a short piece of Javascript code that you need to place at the bottom of every page. Whenever a page is viewed, the code sends its details to Google for collection.

I just logged into my account to see what sort of details it shows. The first thing you see is a nice executive summary that displays some basic statistics:

And here’s a zoomed-in view:

I especially like that little world map that shows you where your visitors are from. Other features of Analytics include a listing of keywords that people searched for to get to your site, and a breakdown of how people got to your site. In my case, a comment I posted on digg is responsible for about 14% of my traffic. Cool.