Google Analytics

When you start writing blog, you may start wondering how many people actually came read your blogs each day, or even wondering where the readers are from. (I think I am a bit slow... as I only begin to curious almost 1 year after I start writing blog lol)

Some of the blog host such as Wordpress integrated basic statistic tool for the author to view, which I think is very useful and should be good enough for most of the bloggers. Unfortunately Blogger does'nt provide such feature (yet), so if you want some statistic for your blog, you will have to find an alternative way. Lucky enough, Google has its own stats tool called Google Analytics (I will use GA as abbreviation from now), and maybe this is the reason why theres no integrated stats tool for Blogger, because GA gives you the flexibility to monitor multiple websites at once.

Above is the main page of GA, as you can see it list out the summary of all the websites you are monitoring. You can also create multiple analytics accounts to monitor websites of different category for easier management (through "Add website profile" link on the bottom left).

Note the status for the example site has a warning sign, this is because GA has not detected the website. In order for GA to communicate with your website, you will need to add the following script to your root page (replace the xxx with your GA code):

<script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <script type="text/javascript"> try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("xx-xxxxxxx-x"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {} </script>

When you click into the report of a website, you can see various summaries in the dashboard including the location of the visitors, the content they visited and even how they get to your website!!! Menu on the left hand side gives you a more detailed break down of those data, very handy for web administrators.

Because this is also a product from Google, you can use your Google account to apply/login and its FREE!! But at the moment Picasa web album doesnt support GA, which is a pitty since I am sure people would like to know the flow on their web album as much as on their blog. Hopefully Google has already scheduled the upgrade in the near future.

Overall I think GA is a pretty good tool to manage the statistics of your websites as it provides detailed report from different perspective. The down side of GA is that the interface is not so intuitive, sometimes it takes a while for me to find something I need, but maybe its not true for more professional users =P

How to add GA script to your Blogger...