PIO Social Media Training

Analytics 101 – Traditional Service Overview

Posted by Dave Konig at 1 March, 2010, 9:00 am

Measuring success. While the old analytics of monitoring website “hits” is hard to apply to the new concepts of Social Media, they can still provide you with important information regarding your agency hub. It’s important to have a reliable service that will accurately measure these important statistics.

Google Analytics

This full service analytics package from Google relies on an inserted Javascript snippet to be placed somewhere in your code. The service offers e-mailable PDF reports, long term statistics tracking, AdSense integration, and a slew of analytic variables. For WordPress blogs there are a number of plugins that will assist you in the code insertion as well as in dashboard tracking.

Service Cost: Free

Sitemeter

This service analytics package also relies on an inserted Javascript snippet to be placed somewhere in your code. The inserted code also inserts a small graphic that will link back to your analytics account so that your statistics are viewable if you leave them open to the public when you sign up.

Service Cost: Free for the Basic limited service, $6.95 per month for a Premium account

Woopra

This service analytics package relies on a Javascript snippet that makes regular server calls to the Woopra servers to allow for live visitor tracking in the downloadable desktop client. A truly live view of your site is valuable during sentinel events. The service has also been experimenting with a Live Chat feature, allowing instant two way communication with visitors. While the free package does not promote long term research, the value of live monitoring (and the possibility of live communication with visitors) can outweigh that slight inconvenience.

Service Cost: Free for up to 30,000 pageviews within a 30 day period, tiered pricing for higher traffic sites starting at $4.95 a month up to $179.95 a month

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About The Author

Dave Konig has authored 135 articles for PIOSocialMediaTraining.com

Dave has been involved in Social Media since 2005 through the current major services and some defunct ones as well. During this time he has been able to hone the craft by testing out the theories of others, creating his own philosophies, and gathering a better understanding of the mediums involved through networking and most importantly actual practice.
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5 Responses to “Analytics 101 – Traditional Service Overview”


Jim Hoffman March 2, 2010
Reply

I get the most from Google analytics. While I am still learning the vast features, it gives me some pretty good immediate feedback on the sites I am tracking. I am working the goals features which I think is important for specific pages that target a certain reaction from your visitors. Tracking links and visitor use is important , but still must be balanced with site look and usability. Creating pages just for the sake of tracking wont make them too attractive for visitors and wind up bringing the time on the page down. Give good content and lead visitors on a journey to get them coming back and recommending your sites to their friends.