Yes, I promise, the post on tagging and folksonomies is coming. But first, a great example of Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 - I wanted to talk about Google Analytics. I found this by way of one of my favorite new blogs, Lifehacker. Lifehacker is great, and shares some of my ethos about technology. They had a link today to a great page: how to dissuade yourself from becoming a blogger. It's funny, and appropriate. I think some nonprofits should read it.
Anyway, being a poor student, and having a few extremely low-traffic sites, I figured I'd stick with Site Meter, which seems to be the best of the free site analysis tools. It gives you all of the necessary stats: page hits, visits, referrers, some nice geographical info, etc.
Google Analytics is also free. You can follow 10 sites instead of one. And it does all of the same stuff, except better. And you don't have to have that silly cube graphic in some far corner of your site. (Some of what Analytics does I don't even understand yet.) And in terms of interface, it blows Sitemeter out of the water.
Google Analytics vs Site Meter
Submitted by mpm on
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I have been using Site Meter
Submitted by Dru (not verified) on
I have been using Site Meter since my blog was born mid-July, but many articles tout the superiority of Google Analytics. I'm leery of Analytics, however, because I can't figure out how to get it to ignore my own visits to the blog whereas Site Meter makes that easy. Do you know of an easy way to get Analytics to ignore my own visits?
If I'm reading your article correctly, you're saying you're sticking with Site Meter. Is that the case?
@Dru, er, that entry was from
Submitted by admin (not verified) on
@Dru, er, that entry was from 3 years ago. I ended up going parallel for a while, then using just Google Analytics. The kinds of detail I could get with it just made Google Analytics the best bet.
Oop, sorry. I forgot to
Submitted by Dru (not verified) on
Oop, sorry. I forgot to check the date!
Can you tell me then, since you're using Google, how you can arrange the settings to ignore your own visits to your blog?
Thanks for any information you can provide.
I've never tried it, but
Submitted by admin (not verified) on
I've never tried it, but here's the answer: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481
Thank you so much! I
Submitted by Dru (not verified) on
Thank you so much! I appreciate your patience as I know my ignorance was showing. There's so much to learn about blogging, but I am improving but slowly, very slowly.
Thank you again for your help.
From my personal experience
Submitted by Debjit (not verified) on
From my personal experience after using both: Sitemeter scripts are slow and increase your page load time, whereas the Google Analytics script is fast! Have you experienced the same?
I have been using analytics
Submitted by Amit Ahuja (not verified) on
I have been using analytics since i begin my site, and i am all satisfied with it. It has a very solid interface that never forces me to use some other thing.
There is also Piwik:
Submitted by mark simko (not verified) on
There is also Piwik: http://piwik.org/ which is free open source.
It requires php and a mysql database. It is a potential choice if you don't wish to share your analytics data with Google, or if you want to include another analytics package in addition to Google Analytics.
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