Google Analytics Does Not Tell You The Whole Story


Hello "Small" Business Website Owner:

You don't want to deal with the technology behind your website too much, don't you. And you don't even have to. A big part of the tasks you need to perform in order to maintain your site can be done from within the browser quite elegantly. There is almost a setup wizard for everything.

Many of you will use Google Analytics to track the performance of your site. It's rather easy to use, although there is some learning curve involved. As reward for studying the tool you'll learn what turns your web visitors on and what turns them off. Those stats are extremely important to grow your site into a profitable direction.

But Google Analytics and many other tracking solutions don't tell you the whole story.

Those type of tools rely on JavaScript code, hidden images and browser cookies. For example, look up the help pages for Google Analytics to find out under which circumstances a visit to your webpage will not be counted. You'll also learn that you need to tag certain types of files (like downloadable PDF-files) manually or with have it done with a plugin function of your CMS or weblog software. Examples for such software are: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress to name the most popular ones.

Generally speaking those tools report valuable information about the visitors that come to your site with good intention.

But that's not what I want to talk about here.

What about the bad guys?

You won't find hints in Google Analytics that your web server is under any sort of attack or that some of your links are broken or that somebody is stealing your bandwidth.

But it is not only about bad guys.

Only Log-files contain information on visits from search engine spiders (they don't bother with JavaScript). It can be useful information for search engine optimization.

The web server logs contain records about every activity, including PDF downloads, image downloads, all sorts of errors that you can't catch otherwise, etc.

Usually your web hosting company offers the use of such software as an additional subscription. Some packages even include a very aggregated from of those types of analysis. Not very detailed with limited functionality but good enough to catch bigger types of issues. Alternatively you can get and install free open-source software or commercial solutions. But first, check with your web hosting company.

Just want to say that: "Look at your log files at least every once in a while."

To Your Success

Yours
John W. Furst
Website Development 
At Fcon21

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