Google Analytics dashboard

A vital thing for anyone producing a product is the ability to track its use and how people are interacting with it. When the average person put up a website a few years ago, their only hope for knowing how many people were coming to their site were those old hit-counters. Well, metrics have come leaps and bounds since then. As an example, take a look at Google Analytics. With just a small piece of code put on each webpage, Google gives you a window into who is coming to a site, where they are coming from, how long they’re spending on your pages, and what paths they’re taking through your content. This kind of information once took a team of IT and marketing people running scripts on log files and generating reports by hand for management. Today it is all free, and I think that is pretty amazing.

There are many great resources for people who want to interpret and utilize the information coming from Google Analytics. One that I walked through this week was “How to track social media traffic with Google.” It helps you to set up custom segments and view your traffic based on the source (such as, you can see how users who found your site through twitter.com tend to navigate your pages).

In the future I’m hoping to take a look at some of the other options that are out there, including Web Trends and Microsoft’s new Developer Tools.