Google Analytics is a tool of almost no limits. From my experiences, it blows all the other free site meters out of the water. Imagine a tool that will tell you about every visitor, every key word searched for your site, every page people enter in, how long they stay after entering that particular page, what page people leave on. How long it takes them to leave from that page. Bounce Rates. Exit rates. Etc. In fact, it can create design campaigns—which I won't go into detail here, but it is a way to create multiple versions of pages and test them out live, comparing all the intrinsic details and differences.

Although this isn't directly related to Drupal, I did use the sweet Google Analytics Module made by Mike Carter. I consider this essential for any site, Drupal or otherwise. At first, I felt Google Analytics had a bit of a learning curve to make my way around it. In fact, my good friend Tim (from orovo weight loss) walked me though it before I really understood. So hopefully this article will do the same for you all.

For now, sign up for Google Analytics, put it into your web page (even a free Blogger web page if you want) and the first thing you will see is a dashboard:

(No making fun of me for not having 1,000,000 visitors a day! I just started this blog! Notice how flat the curve is till June 23^rd. BTW: You can click on the images to see a larger view.)

Dashboard Overview:

Top Graph:

This dashboard is the overview of your site. Starting from the very top right, you can click on how the data is structured: day, week, month, etc. For this, I will stick to days. Right below that is a nice excel style graph of your visit logs. If you are fond of calculus, you can take notice of high slopes and perhaps correlate that with times you were on Digg, release a great blog post, etc. It's a great way to see how people view your site as a function of time. Perhaps you were advertising your site on forums and stopped for a period of time. In that sense, this a graph of your laziness.

Looking a bit closer, clicking on "Visits" near the top right gives you this:


Now this is even more amazing. You can view, as a function of time, your Average Time on Site, Visits, Bounce Rate, New Visitors, etc.

Site Usage:

Below that, to the left, is an overview of your Site Usage, views, etc. I'll leave the trivial stuff to the Google analytics help site. One thing to definitely take notice is the "View Report" button on the bottom of all the panels. You will see that throughout the analytics application and you will need to click it to view even more detailed information (it keeps getting better and better).

Map Overlay:

The Map overlay (middle right of dashboard) is definitely a fun thing to see. And, if you are some kind of international blogger or business, this map could be very important for your business. It shades in countries darker for more visitors. Just like the graphs above, you can view the colors based on visits, average time on site and goals too:

Visitor Overview:

This section located in the middle left can show a graph similar to that of the top, but upon clicking into it "View Report":


This is very straight forward, telling us the details of all the visits, time on site, etc. However notice on the bottom right and left there is a "View Full Report" hyperlink. This is gives more details, some nicer views. I encourage you all to check that out too. Visually, it's not quite as interesting, but it's very easy to figure out.

Traffic Sources Overview:

Bottom left of the dashboard is a pie showing the sources of your traffic. This part is essential for anyone since it completely tells you where your visitors come from: search engines, referring links, typed it in, etc. This will tell you how your site is popular. You could have a great blog and everyone bookmarks your site but no one finds it on Google, which could be a problem; so even though you have a lot of visitors, they may just be the same people or all your traffic is dependent on a few sources instead of something widely used like Google.


Notice, yet again, the "View Full Report" buttons. Clicking those will show you in detail where people are coming to your site from. On the bottom right panel, it shows what search key words people are using to get to your site. Most of the searches are from me and a friend actually. I just started this site up so I'm not quite at the top of Google yet!

I submitted a couple articles to Digg and even though it didn't get to the front page, it got about 40 visitors so far. Clicking on "digg.com (referral)" link, it shows:


It shows that the people who did come from Digg spent some time on my site, especially searching my site (which may mean that they went to incorrect links because of the search404 module) but the high bounce rate means they stuck to that one page and didn't click around. That makes sense since they landed on a main page, not a teaser.

Content Overview

Bottom right on the dashboard is a list of your top pages based on views. Unfortunately, this overview doesn't quite say enough, so going a little deeper (hitting "View Report"):



Starting from the top, again we can view data based on day, week, month. And in here, we see how visitors are acting on each individual page of my web site. If I were to click into one of the links, say the top one http://mydrupaladventures.com:




What is shows is that people tend to spend about a minute on the front page, however the bounce rate is about 60%, which means 40% of the time, they click on a link to "read more."

Conclusion:

This concludes my little Google Analytics review :-). I feel this definitely replaces all free site-metering. In fact, it completely blows out my HostMonster site-metering and that is technically a premium service (even though it's part of the package). I really encourage all web site developers, owners, and hobbyists to install Google Analytics either with the module or putting it in manually—though if you use Drupal, I highly recommend that module since it gives you more control. See my SEO article for details about all search engine related modules I use.