Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Analyze this

Sitemeter has been my analytics tool of choice since I created my blog (though I will confess to a brief dalliance with feedburner), and it's met my needs well enough, but after reading a recent post and the ensuing comments on Angie Ledbetter's Gumbo Writer blog, I was curious about what Google Analytics had to offer.

So I signed up yesterday, which was a simple enough process. Slightly more challenging was trying to figure out where in Blogger the tracking code was supposed to go (Layout tab, under "Edit HTML"). Then there was the small matter of excluding my IP address from the tracking (Sitemeter told me what my IP address was, though I'm sure there are other ways of obtaining this info). Then I just sat back and waited for the information to pour in.

I can't say I'm truly wowed by the tool, but I'm certainly not underwhelmed by it. There's a good amount of info out there, some of which is not available to me via Sitemeter. Does that make it better than Sitemeter? That remains to be seen. I think I'll let them both run awhile and see what happens.

For my readers with a web presence (which is most of you, I think): what analytics tool do you use and why? Is there a (free) tool out there that's better than either of these?

1 comment:

Angie Ledbetter said...

Hey, thanks for the linky love! I had to go look at the name of my site meter. So far, I've been happy with it and the information it provides in the weekly reports --
http://www.statcounter.com/