So you have decided its time to get hard statistics around how your site is performing? That’s great and analytics programs can definitely give you a great view in to your sites performance. Keep in mind however, they can only give data, not answers.
There are many different ways and types of programs used to retrieve analytics. There are also many things a website designer should be aware of when deciding what tools to use and how to use them.
There are two basic types of analytics programs, one is installed on the server the website is hosted on and in some cases is the best method. If you are outsourcing your hosting to an online hosting provider, they generally have this software loaded on the server hosting your site and in some cases the data is free to obtain. The second type is gaining a lot of popularity online now, it involves the use of installing code each page of the site. This code can be time consuming and in some cases get messed up during the hour long copy paste session you have installing it. This leads to incorrect data that you will never know is wrong.
The number one thing a website designer should be aware of is that the analytics programs are not 100% accurate. If you were running two analytics programs on the same web site, they would probably give you two totally different sets of data.
The type of data you can retrieve from an analytics program varies depending on the brand. Here are the most common types of data given to you from an analytics program:
- Amount of visitors by Date and Time.
- Web crawlers that have visited
- Time spent
- Pages viewed
- Web browser
- Operating system
- Errors
- Location
- Internet provider
- IP address
And many more depending on the program.
As you make a decision on which method you should try, consider that if you own and can service the server yourself, if may cost money to install an analytics program on your server, if you outsource your hosting to a third party, find out if they have analytics on your site already, sometimes you may already have it and don’t know you have it, if you decide to install code from a third party, make sure its clean, and correctly installed, and remember that the extra code may cost your viewer a few seconds of load time.