Celebrity Feet Pictures and Latest Gossip

In the last few months here at Sir Blogger we have been using Google Analytics to collect data on several of our websites and it must be said that in line with most of Googles products it appears to work well, and has an in depth amount of information that can be drilled down into.

Google’s service was modeled upon Urchin Software Corporation’s analytics system, Urchin on Demand (Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005). Google still sells the standalone installable Urchin software through a network of value-added resellers.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics

Setting up Google Analytics is a simple enough process, you need to go to www.google.com/analytics and enter the normal information. (email, website etc). Once this is done you will be provided with a small amount of code that you need to place on your site. You need to place it just before the </body> tag on every page that you would like to track. This is easy if you have a footer.php page or similar that is used all over your site.

It can take a day or so before Google Analytics starts processing the data from your site, however the information that it provides is both clear and meaningful.

Here is an example of the type of graphs that are shown when looking at your sites statistics. By default it shows information from the last 7 or so days, however you can change the time frame if required.

One thing that surprised my when looking at these statistics was the number of search words that do not show up on my other website reporting engines. Google Analytics is a tool that we are finding more and more useful as time goes on.