There are several things that designers often leave out of their projects… often, security, privacy, administrative interfaces and monitoring are things that are addressed later, if ever. That’s a very bad position to be in when you’re designing network protocols - if the protocol is implemented by more than one organization, or if it’s widely successful, it can be very difficult to get an update out which addresses these areas. Compatibility issues can also be a killer problem.

Web sites often have the same issues. Sometimes the administrative interface to a web site is simply an admin typing SQL commands to its database. Quite often security is almost an afterthought and there’s little consideration paid to it beyond requiring users to login with a password that’s likely stored in cleartext in the site’s database.

If you want your web site to be successful, you really need to know who your users are and how they’re using it. From a very basic perspective, if you’re designing the site with the assumption that everyone will have 1024×768 resolution or better and it turns out that 80% of your users are still at 800×600, you’ve made a grievous error and you’re likely not to have a clue why 80% of your users never come back unless you keep track of this information.

You may want to collect information to help with the design of your web pages and you may it for marketing purposes as well. Tracking things like users’ geographic locations, where inbound links are coming from, resolution and color depth of users’ displays, the browsers and platforms users are using, and how long users spend on the site and which pages they look at, can be extremely useful in deciding where to invest your development and marketing resources.

Your web server likely tracks some of it in its logs, and if you have access to the logs and to tools like awstats, you may be able to get some information on your users - and for some people this is a fine and appropriate solution. A simpler solution for everyone else is to use a tool like Google Analytics.

Setting up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service from Google which tracks all this information and more on web sites which are enabled for use with it. One account can track up to ten web sites, and you can add other users to allow them access to selected sites.

You can sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html. The service is free. When it was first announced it was so popular that there was a long delay between signing up and actually getting an account… I believe accounts are now granted immediately.

Once you’ve signed up you’ll need to configure it to work with your web sites and modify them to work with it. Google Analytics will create an account number for your account, and will number each web site you monitor with it. You’ll need to embed a piece of Javascript that looks like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-xxxxxx-nn";
urchinTracker();
</script>

at the end of each page you want tracked (likely every page on the site). You should put this at the end of the page so that it doesn’t delay loading your page. The ‘xxxxxx’ will be your account number and the ‘nn’ will be your web site number. Google Analytics will make this clear to you when you set up the site.

Once you’ve added these to your site, it may take up to 24 hours before any data is available on Google Analytics.

Using Reports

Once Google Analytics starts collecting data from your web site, you’ll be able to use it to analyze the data by viewing the reports it offers. You’ll go t the “Dashboard” section of the web site where you’ll get a quick summary of overall traffic, the “bounce rate”, new visitors, map of where visitors are geographically located, which URLs are most visited, and how they’re found (search engines, links in to your site, and direct entry to the site).

You can get greater detail on any of these reports, email the report, export the data and download it to your computer.

You may find some interesting things, like these:

Here I discovered, much to my chagrin, that 7.24% of my visitors have 800×600 resolution displays. I know that the blog this is for looks like crap at 800×600, but I hadn’t realized that 7.24% of my visitors were going to experience that. Now I know I should do something about it.

In the report that breaks down accesses by day of the week, I found that Saturday sees the fewest visitors… the reinforced my decision not to bother publishing articles on the weekends… it’s worth more to me to save them for weekdays when I have more visitors. It was nice to see that I had a lot of traffic on Monday, though.

It’s usually pretty easy to find the information you want, for the timeframe you want. I suggest poking around the site till you’ve got an idea how it works and where to find what you’re looking for.

If you want more of guide to it, “Google Analytics” is well-reviewed on Amazon, but clearly meant for newcomers to the service. I haven’t read it yet.

Summary

The primary advantages of using Google Analytics are that:

• it’s free
• it doesn’t require you to install any special software on your server
• doesn’t require access to your web logs
• it tracks length of depth of visits as well as unique visitors

The primary disadvantages are:

• it requires javascript to be inserted in every page you want tracked
• you’re sharing information about your site with a third party

Using it I’ve been able to learn a lot about the people using my web sites and where the traffic is being driven to me from. It’s been a valuable tool for me.

[tags]google, google analytics, analytics, monitoring, usage, statistics, design parameters, marketing[/tags]

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