The Wonders of Google Analytics Free Service
Google Analytics is a fairly new and free tool to help you, as a webmaster, keep track of your web domain(s). All you do is browse your way over to www.google-analytics.com and sign up (you can also just sign in with your Gmail account, if you happen to have one.) Once you are in, you can choose from a myriad of options, including add a new domain to track, check out info about Google’s Adwords service, add or edit users, manage your report filters, and much more.
Well let’s get started here. Just add a new domain name to track, then copy and paste the small snippet of javascript code into every page you want google to track for you. Just remember to put the snippet of code RIGHT before the </body> tag. You will see there are two different tracking code snippets, the legacy code and the new version. I recommend the New Tracking Code as the Legacy Code is no longer being updated by Google.
As soon as you have your tracking code in place, check the status to make sure Google sees it, then just sit back and wait for the data to roll in. Once the data is transmitted to Google you can then review it, graph it, organize it into charts and reports to get a good idea of who is viewing your website, when they are viewing it, how they are viewing it, and where they came from to get to your site. Data collection could take some time since you need to wait for people to view your site – its best to take a look at data comparatively each week or so, to get a good sample of data from a good amount of users.
There are MANY, MANY more things you can do with Google Analytics with out having to pay any money. While there are some pay services for marketing research and consulting, there are also a boat-load of free services, too. If you are willing to take some time to read up and implement some of these services from Google, take a look at the following links.