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Free statistics service, Google Analytics

By Carlo Piran

Google Analytics is a “freebee” that makes it possible for just about anyone to keep a finger on the pulse of website visitors. This web statistics factory has its roots in the Urchin Software Corporation's analytics system, which the giant Google acquired in 2005. And this is not only one of the better site statistics services around it’s also the top free service.

Users can define and track conversions, or goals, like keeping track of sales, or how many people looked at a specific page, or downloaded a file at the site. By keeping track of these things, site managers and company directors can figure out which ads are doing well and which ones are not. It can also be a way to locate the most surprising locations from which to attract high quality visitors to the site.

Another big plus with Google Analytics is that users can optimise Google AdWords advertisements and marketing campaigns by finding out where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website and even where on the planet they are connecting from.

It’s not hard to hook your website up with Google Analytics. You basically need to just include a bit of script (provided by Google) on each page of your site that you want to keep track of. That script then takes care of the rest, monitoring those who visit and organising the statistics in easy to understand graphs and charts that make it easy to keep on top of your site traffic in a wide array of categories.

Google Analytics pros:

• It’s free – at least for sites with 5 million page views per month or less. Beyond that you need a Google AdWords account.
• It delivers consistent service for big and small websites.
  
• It has everything you'd expect from a good statistics site.
  
• It’s great for keeping track of your AdWords campaigns.
  
• It’s can be installed in as little as ten minutes.
  
• It has good help pages in many languages.
  
• You can track all sorts of things like where visitors came from and where they leave your site as well as how long they stay.
  
• Even a beginner can install it, thanks to great tutorial videos

Google Analytics cons:

• Some people can’t visit a site that is using Google Analytics because their ad filtering programmes block it.
  
• Some people don’t have browsers set up that can work with this programme, and that skews statistics.

Overall, Google Analytics really is a wonderful and worthwhile free of charge tool. Some users might only use it to keep track of their AdWords features, but plenty of people will enjoy having it just to keep a close eye on their website traffic.