Google Analytics

I’ve been using StatCounter for basic site statistics for my blog, but I recently added Google Analytics and find it to be quite useful as well. As near as I can tell, StatCounter is best at providing real-time statistics throughout the day whereas Google waits till the following day to report the current day’s activity. So if I’m curious to see how traffic is going today, I check my StatCounter page, but I’ve been looking to Google when I want to look at long-term trends.

Google reports its data in a highly visual format using a variety of charts and graphs. It also has a simple export feature that allows me to pull that data into Excel and do my own analysis.

Speaking of Google, that’s also still where most of my inbound traffic comes from. Almost 43% of the visitors to my blog come to it via a Google search. MSN is the next highest search engine at just under 19%, followed by Yahoo at 8%. 84% of the visitors are new to the site, and according to the mapping feature, the highest percentage is from North America, but there’s good representation from Europe, Asia and Australia.