If you're wary of Google knowing everything about your business and your web site, then Google Analytics is not for you. But for most, it's a useful ally in a challenging business climate.
Formerly known as Urchin from Google, Google Analytics is now a leading, and free, tool to help businesses and individuals use performance data to improve their online marketing campaigns and web sites. As well as delivering critical information such as unique visitors, page views, visitor location and time spent on site, Google Analytics allows marketers to determine what keywords attract the most visitors to their site and which email campaigns create more customers.
Google Analytics gives online marketers and publishers access to powerful web analytics to help them better understand what their customers or readers want. Although its features are pretty standard (you can pretty much get the same results using OneStat or SiteTracker), Google Analytics is astraightforward to use and is totally free. The only downside is that — as with all Google software — Google Analytics doesn't have the prettiest of interfaces.
Google Analytics provides a useful (and free) toolset for analysing traffic to your web site, but it's interface is typically workmanlike.
To get the software working on your web site you simply need to place unique tracking code immediately before the tag of each page you're planning to track. Life is a lot simpler if your site uses a main template, as you can simply insert the code once to cover your whole site. If your site is database-driven, you'll have to insert the tracking code on your index.php page or equivalent (default.php, index.cfm, for example).
You should also note that a web page containing frames will generate multiple page views — one for the framing page (containing either a FRAMESET or IFRAME tag within its HTML code) and one for each page shown in a frame. As a result, page views may be somewhat inflated. Even if a page on your site only appears as a frame for another page, you should still tag it with the entire tracking code. If a visitor reaches the page through a search engine or a direct link from another site and the page does not contain the tracking code, the referral, keyword and/or campaign information from the source will be lost.
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