Why Analytics?

If your website was built by Visual Harmony, you’re probably already familiar with Google Analytics.  In my humble opinion, Google Analytics is the best website statistics tracking software available.  And with the whopping price tag of $0.00, why would anyone use anything else?

There are plenty of paid alternatives to Analytics, but the features of them pale in comparison to what “The Big G” delivers for free:

1. Track multiple websites under one Analytics account
2. Accurate and detailed reporting
3. Conversion tracking
4. Custom reports
5. See which cities, states and countries are sending you traffic
6. Learn how long visitors are on your site and each page
7. If you have Google custom search built into your site, you can see the terms for which your visitors are searching.
8. Find out which websites are referring traffic to yours
9. Integrated with AdWords to track effectiveness of AdWords campaign

There are many other features that aren’t listed above, but you should really try Analytics and see for yourself, even if you are already using a paid statistics service.

How do I get Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service—it’s just needs to be set up on your site.  Here’s how you do that:

1. Sign up for Google Analytics.  You will need a Google account to sign up. If you don’t yet have a Google account, get one here.
2. After you sign up, make sure you are logged in to Analytics.
3. Once logged in, you will come to the Overview screen.  Near the bottom of the page, click the link that reads “Add Website Profile.”
4. Select the option “Add a Profile for a new domain” (if not already selected) and enter the domain name of the site you want to track.  Click “Finish” when you are done.
5. Google will then generate and display the tracking code for Analytics.  This snippet of Javascript needs to be added to the source code of all the pages you would like to track right before the closing body tag (</body>).  After you have added the tracking code to your pages and re-uploaded them to your server, Analytics will be ready to receive data from your site!
6. Congrats!  You are now ready to put Analytics to use for your site.  Make sure to brag about it to all of your friends so they know just how cool and nerdy you are!

Great news for Flash designers: Google’s search engine spiders can now read the textual content from within your SWFs. Prior to this development, the content of websites designed in Flash was invisible to search engines. It’ll be really exciting when all of the major search engines implement this in their algorithms.

Google continues to impress me with its unrivaled innovation!

Read the full article on The Google Blog