Eleventy-two

Google Analytics

Nearly all webmasters have now heard Google Analytics, Google’s website statistics package, so having set this blog up I took the opportunity to try it out.  Setting Analytics up was easy, if you already have an Google account registering for Analytics takes seconds, agree to the usual EULA and enter your website address and your almost ready to go.  Google Analytics uses Javascript to track usage and the next step of setting up the service is adding their script snippet to every page on your site.  Because all I have at the moment is a blog on here, all I had to do was edit one template file and everything was set up.  Note however the analytics page does show data in real time, processing is done in batches once every two hours, which isn’t exactly clear so you have to weight a little while before data starts getting shown.

One thing I have found out is that it’s probably worth setting up filters strait away, else you may get all excited only to find out all your traffic is coming from yourself.  If you have a static IP this is easy just go setting page (link is found just under the google analytics logo on the home page) click edit next to your domain and find the button for “add filter”.  Name your rule, and choose to “exclude all traffic from an ip address”.  You will then need to enter your internet IP  address bellow, in the form “192.168.1.1 ” the back slashes are needed because anything entered in a filter is treated as a regex.  If you are using WordPress you might want to add the following rule as well, to block post previews from the stats too, as these are likely to be all from yourself.

Name: preview
Filter type: Custom - Exclude
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Pattern: preview=true
Case Senstive: true

I have encluded an example output from the Analytics dashboard to give an idea of some of the information the tool gives you, though with a few more visitores I am sure it would be more interesting.  The report is only an overview of the information avaliable and it is possible to drill down further to find out for example which of your blogs posts people have spend the most time on, as well as being able to view the path people traverse your site with, and the details that people used if they searched for you.

So now with all this information, I can work on getting more viewers to this blog; anything greater than 1 has goto be a win.