Google Analytics & The Small Website

... is it suited to small sites without Adwords & eCommerce

[austtr]

In my neck of the woods, a typical client portfolio will have a varied mix of stats reporting applications, ranging from the good, the bad to the %$&^*! ugly. In nearly all cases, the stats reporting is bundled with their hosting package. Webalyzer and AWStats are two of the more common apps, but there are some other real doozies out there.

I've been wondering if Google Analytics would be a way to bring all the sites onto a common stats reporting platform. However, from what I've read on the Google site plus other resources there seeems to be a heavy emphasis on reporting and analysis relating to Adwords and eCommerce.

Does anyone have experience with Google Analytics with sites that do not operate Adwords and eCommerce? Does it offer the same set of typical reports found in Webalyzer, AWStats, SurfStats and the like?

[treeline]

I use it for sites like yours. I like it better than the included services like awstats or webalyzer because it goes into much more detail that you can drill down through.

Yes, there's a bunch of advertising and sales pages to be ignored, but the ability to track referrals to individual pages backwards to where exactly they come from is great, plus see what parts of a site are most popular from any time period to another. You can corrupt their intended "goal" process (for tracking sales) to track who and what referrals lead to key pages on your site. Oh, 87% of people from site A always read our job postings, but none from site B. Hmmm.

I use the others less and less, and Analytics more. It seems to filter out the spiders, so use the old programs to look at their activity.

[treeline]

Also, it's possible to use AdBlock (or similar options) to avoid showing up in your own stats as you work on the site.

Just block your browser's access to the url it uses:
http:// www. google-analytics. com/ urchin.js

This is especially useful on small sites where you can skew your own stats.