What’s a webmaster or blogger’s next biggest concern aside from coming up with good design and great content? It’s traffic. Websites thrive on traffic. If you have an e-commerce oriented website, or if you rely on advertising revenues from your site or blog, the bigger the traffic, the better, in most cases.

However, it’s not only raw traffic that matters. A webmaster should know not only the total number of page views his site gets in a month, but he has to determine his site’s daily unique visitorship, how long his readers stay on, what kind of computers they use, and yes, even from what country or location they’re in. These are important figures.that enable a webmaster to make the appropriate adjustments to his website, to optimize for better readership, better usability, and even search engine searchability.

Here’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Why you should use it?

It’s free, it’s lightweight, and it’s easy to use. It’s more reliable than your host’s own AWstats program because it only counts data from actual sessions that load up your website, and not just raw, un-analyzed hits. It’s better than other free web-based stats tools also. Google Analytics does just what the name says. It analyzes your web traffic for you, and from this you can make inferences on how to better optimize your site for readership and search engines.

An overview

Before we jump into the specifics, let’s first check out Google Analytics on a broader scale. Here are the views that Analytics gives webmasters:

Executive View

The executive view provides the statistics from a traffic-only point of view. This includes the total visits and pageviews that your site gets. You also get the number of unique visitors and first-time visitors, and top referrals. Analytics also shows you a graphical representation of your readership in terms of geography. What’s good is that Analytics already gives you an analysis of averages, which it does over time.

Marketer View

The marketer view gives you information on your marketing campaigns, especially useful if you utilize Google AdSense on your site. You get a cost-per-click (CPC) analysis, CPC versus organic conversion, keyword conversion, keyword optimization, campaign conversions, and even a site overlay that lets you know which links or areas on your site are clicked most often.

Webmaster View

The webmaster view would give you information about the web design aspect of your site, and how appropriate these are to your readers. You get information such as web browsers and operating systems used, screen settings, languages, availability of flash and java, connection speed, and even the host names (of the reader’s ISP).

Next, we shall discuss how to install and use Google Analytics on your site.