ShaneRQR

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ShaneRQR
825 days ago

Allright, here are the basic analytics that absolutely every website should implement, no matter what.

What does it do?

Basic analytics tells you:

• How many visitors you are getting to your website
• Which pages those visitors are looking at
• Where the visitors are coming from
• What links they are clicking on
• What they were searching for, if they came to your site via a search engine

These stats are always tracked over time, so that you can see how the site is developing.

Depending on the analytics program used, there can be fewer or more features being tracked.

How to implement analytics

There are many free analytics solutions that do a very good job. Most of them require you to add a bit of javascript code to your site.

Probably the most commonly used solution is Google Analytics. It offers a nice interface and very thorough and detailed data.
A similar, free and non-Google option is Statcounter. It works pretty much the same as Google Analytics. The interface isn't quite as fancy, but that's not really essential.
Finally, don't forget that most hosting providers come with Awstats pre-installed. Again, less-fancy interface but it's a completely free solution and the data is quite detailed. Also no need to install extra code on the sites to make use of Awstats.

There are some paid solutions, but for the most part, they only make sense for high-traffic sites and when you want to make use of a specific feature they offer, that the free ones don't (e.g. heatmaps). To start out with, any of the solutions mentioned above are more than adequate.

Why bother?

People tend to obsess over the visitor-count and of course, that is an important metric. No matter what your site, you probably want more visitors, right?

However, visitor-count is not the most important metric. Much more attention should be given to Traffic Sources and Search Terms. Both of these give you information about how your visitors are finding your site.
If you see people coming in from a particular site at a high rate (say, a YouTube video), you should probabyl go make some more videos. Or perhaps you've been making videos, but no-one's coming to your site through them. In that case, you either need to change something about the videos or try a different promotion method.
As for the search-terms: They can give you important clues about what people are looking for. It can be beneficial to optimize your site for some common serach terms to leverage the traffic you're already getting from them.