Blog: Metrics

Determining the Best Website Tracking Tool

Recently several of our clients have asked which is the better tool to track website traffic, Google Analytics or server logs. I love to see our clients becoming passionate about their statistics, so this is a fun question for me to tackle. Before you start going back and forth between which tracking system is superior, it’s important to understand that many of your options are fundamentally different (kind of like apples and oranges or cats and dogs).

The Short Answer: Google Analytics

For most smaller organizations, Google Analytics is the solution to pick. It’s comprehensive, easy to use, and it’s free. But it’s not perfect, and it won’t meet every organizations needs.

The Long Answer: It Depends on You

Meet Our Metrics and Strategy Ninja

A couple weeks Steve Olson officially joined the Development Seed team and boy are we excited. Steve will be helping us build smarter communications solutions. He’ll spend most of his time measuring the success of the online tools we build and helping us to maximize their impact. He’ll also be using this knowledge come up with creative, results driven communications approaches that we know our clients will love.

Google Analytics
and other outside-your-web-community metrics tools allow you to see
useful stats about visitors to your website. You can see amount of time
spent on your site, return visitors, total page views, what pages are
being viewed, where people enter your site and from where, what page
they leave from, from where in the world they view your page, what
browser, etc. You can do a lot with these stats, like make more with
Google AdWords, for example. What about what’s happening inside your
site?

There is a lot to measure within a community site. Some of
the important metrics depend on what your site does. For example, if
your community is a software development community, stats and listings
on outstanding bug reports, feature requests, and open issue tickets
can be important. Taking this same data and plotting it over time to
see the average length of an open issue report could be helpful for
measuring and setting goals.

This is a test of a way to see where our users of the blog are coming from. This is free... I guess we will see if it really begins tomorrow.
For more information go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hitmaps/


Where are visitors to this page?