Early on, the priority of a serious blogger becomes to confirm factually the number and the origin of the visits to her web site (usually, this is the first step to optimize the paying advertisment). In order to fulfill this goal, several management packages may be found. I tested several of them (with WordPress, even if most of them are working with nearly any other web site solution).
Google analytics
Supposed to be fast becoming the market leader (due to the size of its sponsor), Google Analytics has the major inconvenience of not being officially started yet and to be available only if and when you are invited.
I could not yet be invited (having a working gmail invitational email address seems to be a good trigger here). So, I could not test it yet.
This missing information is now available in a separate post/article about Google Analytics.
Alexa
The less well known search engine also provides services for web site owners, like visits statistics. The constraints on the site design are very small but they quickly admit that they are only really interested in big web sites (those appearing in the top 100,000).
Since roumazeilles.net is only around 700 or 800,000, I am still wanting some more.
Performancing metrics
Performancing is a company providing a wealth of services to web site owners (even more specifically for bloggers).
In the midst of the paying offer, there is a service providing free stats for any kind of wbe site (or for a family of web sites). The home page of the stats package looks approximately like the following:
roumazeilles.net stats (click to enlarge)
The major interest comes from the large amount of collected data and that you can have a look at the top 5 or at the totoal data for each presentation set (for example, you can check ALL the words used in search engines to reach your web site – very handy).
Internal statistics (Webalyzer v2.01)
This is the one I use for the longest time. Webalyzer is very detailed and ripe with well-presented data and graphs. But it is starting to show its age and lacking a few recent developments (like advertisment management). As it needs to be installed directly on the Apache server of your hosting provider, you either have it in the hosting package or you don’t. But it is so simple that many providers include it as a standard.
www.spamanti.net statistics (click to enlarge)
Internal statistics (plug-in CG-Referer)
To be commented later.
Leave a Reply