If you are new to marketing your site on the web, then one of the most important tools that you will need is an Analytics program to gauge traffic performance to your site. Without an Analytics program, you won’t be able to know where your traffic comes from, what advertising programs are really converting at your site, or how much much your campaigns are actually costing you.
You can choose from a range of existing products on the market or you can build the analytics internally. If you don’t have the resources or cash to build your Analytics program, a fair and free alternative is Google Analytics -www.google.com/analytics Yes, you read it correctly, it’s a free product from Google, but there are some minor issues that you should be aware of, if you decide to run advertising campaigns to drive traffic from the Advertising Networks. Google does not record every ‘Unique Visitor’ to a site due to its coding language, which will not pick up. Google will under report the amount of users. Make sure to place a pixel from the Advertising Network on your homepage so you can check the Advertising Network’s reports against Google’s Analytics.
Like any other free software tool that you find on the Web, you can’t completely customize Google Analytics the way that you need, if you have a complicated eCommerce site, but for those simple marketing informational sites, it does work well. To get started, all you have to do is place the ‘pixel’ code that is given to you by Google Analytics at the end of the sign-up process into the <head> tags of each page of the site, then you’re ready to go. It’s as simple as that. It takes approximately 24 hours before the reports are populated with data.
If you do have an eCommerce website that requires a lot of analytic customization, consider Web Trends. Web Trends is a great analytics tool, but can be costly.
No matter what you choose for your Analytics program, make sure to test it against your internal logs to make sure that the traffic numbers are true numbers.