If you’ve got a website, whats the point in trying to improve it if you dont know where you are now, what parts are popular and what parts are not even visited. For example, do you know which is the most popular page on your site that people leave. You may be surprised that a significant number of visitors never get past your homepage; or they leave before getting to the checkout. The answer is website analytics. - sometimes called web-metrics.
There are loads around and in the old days, you put a hit counter on your site and we happy to see the numbers going up. Now you can get highly sophisticted software to analyse the activity. These tools fall into two main areas: server based and client based. Server based analytics use the server’s own web logs as a source of data. - for example Webtrends - a very expensive piece of software that allows you to analyse everything - if you have the time Client based solutions only need a simple piece of code on your web pages to be able to collect a good amount of data. More importantly however is the need to analyse this data. Webtrends is a powerful tool, but I found it quite hard work. Its also very expensive.
On the other hand, Google Analytics is FREE and almost as powerful. There are those that argue that the server based solutions provide better results and do not burdon any additional load onto your visitors loading time, however for a price of zero, I can live with that. At some point in the future I’ll do a complete review of Google Analtyics, in the meantime : http://www.google.co.uk/analytics/
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