It’s very important that you have some type of analytic tool running on your shop and blog.
Without it, you are working in the dark when it concerns who is coming and going from your place of work. With it, you are the true master of providing very wanted valued content to your users.
When it comes to talking about analytic tools most likely you will say I have heard about or are using Google analytics. Google analytic is a great tool I use it myself on a few of my projects, however, the reason why I have learned of other analytic programs is that Google analytic let me down on one of my sites which at the time was the main and only website I was working on. Everything was fine and then days would go by and I was looking at Google analytic’s results and it was showing me that no one was coming to my site at all. This would have been fine if it was a new site but it wasn’t because I was new to the internet at that time, I thought that I merely needed to do more promoting to start the flow of traffic again.
If you doubt results, double check further
Well after a week of no visitors coming to my website by what Google analytic’s was telling me, something in my gut told me to check my hosting data stats. All I can say is thank god I listened to my intuition because when I looked at my hosting data, it showed that actually I was getting traffic and some good traffic come to think of it. It was at this enlightenment that I realize that even though Google is a big business player, they are still like any other business and like other business their programs can also fail.
Once I had this new found knowledge I headed over to Google’s help website and I was astounded to find that I was not the only one with this problem. What really shocked me was that many other webmasters had experienced the same and was already asking Google for a solution. These queries spanned years from looking at the website’s forum, with many still not having any answers. I realized then that I had to find another program to solve my solution. The longer I waited for a response the more website data I was missing out on.It was this quest that got be find many other analytic tools all featuring the great features for free and paid.
Free is not also the best choice
This experience has opened my eyes to the fact that you can become very complacent with what you use on a daily basis. Also when businesses are offering their software to you for free, you automatically accept it, because it’s not costing you a penny. If everything online was paid you would find people being a lot more careful to what they used because money is involved.
Well, you need to learn to have this same mentality with whatever software you decide to use for your business, especially if it’s free. The list below is small compared to what is available however you don’t want to overwhelm the situation. Checking out the sites Analytics features to see what appeals to you is all that is needed. Also finding out how you add it to your sites/blogs will also be helpful.
The most common ways of adding tracking code are either manually via copy and pasting it into your footer.php file if you are using a self-hosted WordPress platform.
Some WordPress theme provides a separate section in the dashboard area where you can put a snippet of the code.
In Blogger or a static HTML site, the template is the place to add the code. Again at the bottom, before this tag.
You may already have an analytic tool working for you, then you need to have a plan B. If things start going wrong you need to able to know where to go so you don’t miss out on vital information from your users. It took me a week to find another tool to use and then when I did, it did not offer the important details I wanted, so I have to research again. To tell you the truth I am still not 100% happy with the tool I am using at present however it does give me the results I need and it will do until I find one that is on the level of Google analytics.
http://www.google.com/analytics/ – free [I use]
http://piwik.org/ – free
http://statcounter.com/ – free & paid – [I use]
http://www.opentracker.net/ – free trial
http://www.histats.com/ – free
