10 July 2009
Yeah for sure, www.statcounter.com is a great tool, I use it on all my websites, and also awstats is a comprehensive stats package.

10 July 2009
Hi Simon,

I have, and still do, use Urchin, it provides a lot of great information, but Google Analytics is actually pretty nice. If you have never seen it, it provides a lot of very useful graphical information that is easy to read, let's you schedule reports to be emailed to you, you can add filters to avoid the reports from recording internal traffic and a lot more.

Other cool features include a US and World map that shows you how many people have visited your site, by clicking on the map you can view the number of hits by country, state (province, territory, etc.) and city.

There is also a great site overlay that shows you the percentage of clicks from links on your website, using your actual website! Pretty neat.

I recently set up an account for my wife and she is just digging it!

Give it a try... it's free.

Cheers,
Mark Cloyd
Mark Cloyd Designs

13 July 2009
hi simon

check out http://www.mon.itor.us/ , it gives lots of options for monitoring the websites.

Regards

Arunlal

13 July 2009
Hi Simon,

Don't get me wrong I love stats and can get lost in them for hours - happily, but I recently came across something that blew my mind, it gave me a much quicker short cut to understanding visitors on a website.

Think of this scenario:

You look at the stats for your website, you spend the best part of 1-3 hours deciphering it all. You find out some really interesting things about what people are doing in terms of what pages they are going to etc. but you think to yourself I wish I could just watch someone go through my site to see what they do or react to.

So to the point of this answer - go to http://userfly.com and sign up you get some free recordings and it's relatively cheap for 100 recordings a month.

Like Google Analytics you add a little bit of code to your website and basically it records the mouse movements and clicks of each visitor to your site.

Now please be aware it has some odd little glitches here and there, but I personally think it's one of the best cost effective analysing tools to come out in the last year or so. I get my clients to pay for it directly and they pay me to watch the videos and make suggestions and do changes based on actual user interaction.

You would be amazed at the number of people that read each line of text with a mouse pointer or highlight important information.

Now there are companies set up to do this sort of testing and charge a fortune for it, but my personal opinion is that those results are ALWAYS skewed, why? Well the people testing are given a purpose to surf a site, so they AREN'T your actual everyday, come to your site, visitor.

Anyway yes Google Analytics is very good and many other stats programs and if you install userfly as well, then you'll have a real advantage over your competitors, you can see your actual visitors go round your site and change it to suit them.

I hope that helps you out!

Alan

14 July 2009
Hi Simon

I have looked at many packages over the years and Google Analytics really gives you the information you need.

I

16 July 2009
You should go for Google Analytics - really. I did a video which explains the basics of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGvIezBWxv0

Is there a reason that you're skeptical?

If you're just dying for some more options, here are a few good ones (highest on the list are most recommended):

www.crazyegg.com
www.clickdensity.com
www.clicktale.com

Best,
Calvin Froedge
www.creativelogicmedia.com

16 July 2009
Don't let anyone flog you anything for this - Google Analytics will nail it for you - what ever you need, you just need to know how to use it.

17 July 2009
Google analytics is great for long term in depth stats, statcounter is probably a bit easier to use and is great for real time stats.

29 July 2009
The only metric I use in our sites (which I use in addition to Google Analytics) is Mint.

www.haveamint.com

It's simple, fast (as in real-time), and doesn't bog you down when all you want is what you want. I need to work fast, so I find I use this far more often than GA.

4 August 2009
I like Statcounter for it's simplicity, most anyone can understand the features. Google Analytics is good too, but does not track all your hits.

One that I highly recommend, and sign all my clients up for is Sheer SEO: http://sheerseo.com. They track your SERP (search engine results position), and email you whenever there is a change.

9 August 2009
The great thing about Google Analytics (apart from the fact that it is free!) is that the reporting is pretty easy for the clients to understand and you can just subscribe them into a regular update.

18 August 2009
Google Analytics has more than you could ever need, and is free.

5 September 2009
I agree with most here : Google analytics for in-depth stats over a long period and Statcounter.com for easy to use real time stats. Both are FREE.

We often install both for our clients. It has mixed comment. Som elove one, other or both. But GA needs time to learn, understand and interpret. it can be overkill for some but even sticking to the obvious stuff like traffic numbers and which keywords have been used is very useful to you.

You should definitely have a system for monitoring traffic - it will help shape your future success on-line - unless you like the hazard of guessing !!

We use them to suggest and help customer who may suggest a change but we can counter or agree using stats if it's a good/bad idea.

2 October 2009
statcounter only logs a certain amount of information unless you pay! but its well worth it.