Tools for Statistics

The first thing that I do in an online marketing campaign is compare the website I’m working on with its competitors and get a good feel for the present visitor statistics so that I’ve got a way of measuring progress.

Alexa provides traffic statistics based on the a sample of internet users. It’ll tell you where your website is ranked in the list of most popular sites. It’s pretty useful but it’s much more accurate when you’re dealing with more popular websites.

Google Analytics is my visitor tracking software. I like the way that it integrates very well with AdWords although it is a bit of a pain when you’re working with other advertising networks too. I also like it because it’s free and very easy to install so there are no barriers to getting it up and running for a client. The negative is that because it’s Javascript-based people with Javascript turned off won’t show up but I think that’s a small enough number that I’m not too bothered.

AWStats is good for web server log file analysis and it’s good to look at alongside Google Analytics. It’s good for alerting you to error 404’s and other technical problems with the site. On the marketing side I find the lists of host names interesting and it gives good details of crawls by robots which are not shown on Google Analytics. Of course AWStats gets thrown by proxies and isn’t very good at identifying unique visitors so Google Analytics will in general give a more accurate picture.

The sitemaps at Google and Yahoo will give you some useful insight into how the search engines see your site and will alert you to any crawl problems. They also give you the opportunity to tell the search engines a bit about your site, but I’ll cover that later.

Finally, the Google Toolbar will give you the PageRank of sites that you visit. This is handy as a rough guide although it’s only updated roughly once a quarter so you won’t see changes very often.