The previous 3 posts in this series have looked at ways of analyzing and boosting traffic to your web site. Today I am going to delve deeper into the analytics side of things.

Learning how visitors discover your site, what they do at your site once they get there, and how they leave your site, can provide a useful insight into the type of audience you’re attracting. This information can be used to gain a better understanding of your visitors, such as which posts are the most popular, how visitors navigate around your site, or provide clues on how you can reorganize your web site to better cater for your visitors.

There are a host of Analytics packages out there, either standalone or as a WordPress plugin. I am going to cover three such packages today, Google Analytics and new kid on the block Clicky Web Analytics, and finally the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics

This is probably the best known analytics packages so I will start with this one first. The Google Analytics Home Page is probably the best place to start. This page will give you a brief overview of what it has to offer together with a product demo. You will need an existing Google Account service such as GMail before you can use the service, otherwise you will need to register first.

Once you’ve registered you will need to login to your Google Analytics account and add your website. The instructions are easy to follow. Once you’ve added your web site you are given a piece of tracking code which you need to add to your web site. This code will track all the user activity on your web site. If you use WordPress or some other blogging platform then a good place to put the tracking code would be in the header, footer or sidebar, as these items are displayed on every page on your site.

If you use WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. The plugin will automate the process of adding the tracking code to your web site, and the plugin is highly configurable.

Once the tracking code has been added you need to wait up to 24 hours for Google to start collecting the tracking information. You will then be able to login to your Google Analytics account and view the reports on your web site. The reports provide you with a dashboard type view. The reports cater for three user personas – executive, marketer and webmaster. You can select one of these personas from the View dropdown and the reports available will adjust accordingly.

I won’t go into exhaustive detail on each report available, but the following areas I find most interesting. The first is the Executive Summary which provides you with a graph showing the number of visitors over the last week, and pie charts showing ratio of new versus returning visitors and the number of referrals, and finally a map showing the location of your visitors. Here is an example of what this looks like. You can customize the view to cover whatever date range you like, such as weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.

Next is the Marketing Summary which shows the top referrals to your site, the top search engine keywords used to get to your site, and the top campaigns. This is useful for seeing at a glance where traffic is coming from to your site.

The Content Summary report will show you how long visitors stay on a particular page, whether they exit your site after reading a single page, or whether they continue their visit and look at other pages on your site. This is a good way at analyzing whether your content is retaining visitors. You can track this information over time which is a good way to see if particular campaigns are more successful at retaining visitors than others.

As you can see above, several pages have a high bounce rate which means people often leave the site after reading a single page. The lower the bounce percentage figure the better.

Finally there is the Site Overlay report. This will show the most commonly visited links on your page. This can be useful in refining your web site design to focus on the higher quality links.

There is a lot more to Google Analytics then I can cover in this post. The best thing to do is to explore the site yourself. There is a lot of information on campaigns, advertising success and ROI then I haven’t even touched upon.

For the average user though, some people might find the number of reports in Google Analytics daunting, it also could be improved from a usability perspective too. I would like to see hyperlinks included in the report, especially around the area of referrals, so I can be taken to the exact spot where a visitor came from. This is where the next analytics package excels.

Clicky Web Analytics

If you like simple to understand reports, with an easy to navigate UI and hyperlinks that take you to the exact spot a visitor came from, then maybe this is the package for you. It is free to register and installation is similar to Google Analytics, involving placing some tracking code on your web site. Their home page gives a good comparison of how Clicky stacks up against the competition. You can also try out a demo for yourself.

Here is an example of what your home page looks like when you login to your Clicky account. The report is plain and simple and I like the hyperlinks on the left which I can click on for further details.

You will notice at the top of this screenshot is a series of tabs which you can click on for further information.

The first of these tabs is the Visitors page. This will provide detailed information about your visitors, where they came from, what operating system they are using, what screen resolution they are using etc. What makes this page different from Google Analytics is a hyperlink to the Actions page. This provides an audit trail of each visitor to your site, how they found your site, what page they visited first, what other pages they visited, and what page they left your site. The report is in a clear and easy to understand format and far easier to digest than Google Analytics.

Next is the Content page which will provide information on top content and entrance and exit points. The Links page will show you the top incoming and outgoing links plus the top referrers. The Searches page will show the search engine keywords used to get to your site. There is also an interesting Spy page where you can look at user activity in real time and an RSS page where you subscribe to web site activity.

I have been using Clicky for almost a week now alongside Google Analytics without any issues. It is still in development and there are areas which you can’t drill into yet, such as viewing stats over multiple days, but this is being worked on by the author and will be available as a new feature soon.

You can catch up on all the latest developments and news at their blog. I did notice on their blog that they had a couple of issues recently with their Apache server, it looks like Clicky is hosted on a shared rather than a dedicated server but that shouldn’t be an issue. Hopefully these issues will be few and far between.

Overall this looks an impressive analytics package and is certainly one to keep on your radar.

Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress

For those of you that don’t want to register with any analytics provider, then consider trying one of the many WordPress plugins out there. One of these is the popularity contest plugin from Alex King. Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. You can view these figures from your WordPress administration panel and you can also display this information in your blog, such as in the sidebar.

If you use any caching plugin, like wp-cache, it will affect the ability of Popularity Contest to accurately record views. I’ve recently installed wp-cache so I will probably have to disable the Popularity Contest plugin now.

Summary

That sums up this article on analytics packages. There is something there for everyone, whether you want detailed statistics at every level or just an overview. If you want to get to know your visitors better then I recommend you take a closer look at one of the analytics packages out there.

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