If you really are serious about web development, Google analytics will play a large part in your monthly/weekly/daily reporting. Analytics is a free service offered to web developers by Google. Using tracking code in your website and an online control panel you can obtain in-depth data about your website and online campaigns.
The boffins over at Google have recently released a ‘closed’ beta offering something never seen before in the analytics control panel.. A true ‘real time’ view of your current sites visitors, with statistics updating every second. Currently when switching to the beta view, you get:
- Overview pane
- Current visitor count – Shows the number of people visiting your website right now
- Page views per minute – Shows the number of page views in the last 30 minutes broken down into 1 minute segments
- Page views per second – Shows the number of page views in the last 30 seconds broken down into 1 second segments
- Top referrals – Shows the number and names of referring websites
- Top active pages – Shows you the busiest webpage on your site
- Top keywords – Shows you how your current visitors found your sites by the keywords they used
- Top locations – Shows an interactive map of where your current visitors are located
The overview pane works much like most of Google’s sites, giving you the ability to totally customise what widgets are on display and where.
You can read more about the arrival of Analytics Realtime over at Googles Blog
If you don’t currently have access to Realtime Analytics, you can submit a request for access
Although analytics play an important part in web development, I always offer the same advice to up and coming budding web entrepreneurs. Try not to get disheartened with slow visit rates in the first few weeksmonths and sometimes even years of your online presence. Depending on what you set out to achieve on the internet – getting large amounts of traffic to the site without spending large volumes of cash on advertising isn’t easy. So stick at it, and make sure you don’t neglect your site maps and meta data.