Blogging Startup Step 5: Analyze Your Site Traffic With Google Analytics

Now is the time to implement a method on counting visitors, knowing their locations, knowing the operating system they use, the keywords (yes this is true and possible) they used to discover your site and other ways of traffic analysis. This method is called Google Analytics. It is a free web tool that webmasters and bloggers can use to discover valuable information about the characteristics of visitors' traffic. This method reveals a lot. And the most important, as I've said, it's free.

Yesterday, I already installed the Google meta tags to this blog so data gathering can be displayed by Google anytime soon. I need to have this to have a proof that traffic generation methodologies that I implemented with this blog is worth to try or not.

If you are new to Google Analytics, you can register at www.google.com/analytics using your Gmail email account. But don't enter yet directly your email account to the "sign in" fields. You have to click the "Sign up now" to register first.

Once you are registered, you can click the "Add Website Profile". A page is displayed to enter the URL of the website that you want to monitor. Another field, Time zone country, should also be filled up and then click the "Continue" button. A javascript called "Legacy Tracking Code" will be given to you and you need to put that in your blog site. As for blogger.com, it is easy, just include that snippet to one of the "HTML/JavaScript" widgets that you have in your blog's "Layout". Or, you can create one, if you don't have one yet. The snippet will not display anything when your page is run in the browser so you don't have to worry about the look of your page.

Once the code is saved to your blog, go to "Website Profile" and click the "Check Status". If your code is included correctly, Google will verify that and indicate in website profile that you've done it good.

The next you do is wait then in a few hours or days you will see statistics of your traffic. Below is an example of the charts that you can see in Google Analytics; click it to enlarge:

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