Google Analytics - cool tool for website owners

If you own a website and you haven’t heard of Google Analytics… where the hell have you been?

By inserting some scripts from Google Analytics to your website, Google could analyze and provide all sorts of data about your web for you.

You can find out how many folks visit you, how many pages they view, how do they reach you, via which site, which link, how many came through direct links… Actually any reasonable host package’s statistical data should provide you this but Analytics has more to offer.

I haven’t fully utilized all of them yet but here’s two features I like a lot.

One is called “Site Overlay”. It shows on the web page where you inserted the Analytic script, visitors’ “behaviour”, like how many visitors clicked on certain links etc. For webmasters, this is crucial as it helps you to analyze visitors’ behaviour better. For me, I found that I have about 49% returning visitors who click on the “Updates” link when they enter my site. Looks like they are looking for updates. I better start work…

Another favourite is Visitors’ Geo Map Overlay, like on the left. The orange dots indicate location of visitors to my website. If you look carefully, seems like I have lots of visitors from USA, Europe and some from Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Man, I have to work on India, South America, Canada and Africa! Also China and Russia!

The larger the dot, the higher the number of visitors. Not suprisingly, the largest dot is in Malaysia.

On the Google Analytics site, by placing the cursor on each dot, I get the city and number of visitors from there. For example, there was one time I saw 3 visitors in Bukit Mertajam, Penang, Malaysia. Hey, I know 3 DIYers there. It could be them. Or probably just someone else. But still quite fun!