Google Analytics
Sun, September 13th 2009 at 11:33pm
After installing the new blog I thought I would be a good time to try Google Analytics. On my old site I simply used Webalizer which was supplied by my host, and it gave me a general idea of what was going on with the site. But really did not give any idea of what people are actually doing on the site. Google Analytics is much better at this, because it does not just track hits to certain pages, but also gives you stats on many other useful things like Bounce Rate, Traffic Type, Visit Time, Returning Visitors, etc.
For a site as small as mine it’s more of a point of interest than a vital tool, but it has recently helped me find a problem. After looking at the stats for a few weeks now I saw that one page (node/36) from my old site was getting hit pretty heavily, and going to 404 error. I knew this would happen because I did not map my old Drupal urls to the new Wordpress posts. But it seems that an old Wallpaper I made for Ubuntu got a pretty high Google ranking in image search for some keywords. So I was getting some decent traffic from that, but most of the people Bounced off the site as soon as they hit the 404. I got all this info from Google Analytics.
So after learning this I added a Redirection Plugin and setup a 301 Redirect for node/36 to the new post I made about the wallpaper. Now eventually Google should pick up the redirection and update it’s index, and hopefully people will find what they are looking for.
Google Analytics an extremely useful tool, even for personal sites like this one. It should be in any Webmasters toolkit.
