Hello, My name is Shannon and I have been making money online for the last several years. I am dedicated to showing everyone I can how to replicate my blogging success. I work very hard and I have been featured on some of the biggest blogs on the net, you can 
I once wondered where my traffic was coming from, I used awstats and it showed a little bit of detail as to where the hits were coming from but it never provided hard cold facts and stats that I needed to sell my advertisements better.
Today we are going to look at 2 programs that allow you to do this for free, I will then discuss why I like one more over the other. Warning though, if your a google hater this post may not be for you, generally I am not to fond of google but in this instance I have to recommended them.
The Long Story - Over the years I wanted to know where my traffic came from, I also wanted to know how people were reaching my site whether that be by a search engine or a referring website. These stats and valuable to not only myself to know where to advertise but also to my advertisers so they know where and how people are going to reach there ads.
While it may seem a bit primitive or perhaps I am just numb to all the programs out there I never thought I would see the stats the way I wanted to. I wanted a simple system with a complex breakdown of all my stats and how people were getting to my website.
After months of searching and trying out programs I finally found two that did basically exactly what I want. Let me first start with the one I don’t care for as much but if you are a google hater this is a good choice.
Site Meter- SiteMeter is a free service (unless you want more advanced stats) that allows you to see where your traffic comes from. It breaks it down into several sections like referrals and such. While SiteMeter is good I found it to be a little unorganized for my needs. That aside the stats it gives you are great and the SiteMeter system does email you either daily, weekly, monthly etc…
You can choose how often the system emails you and it works quite well. Since this is not a review of site meter I won’t get into to much detail as to how the system works. In fact I am not even going to provide screenshots of the sitemeter system because I simply cannot recommended it over Google Analytics which is actually the next system I want to talk about.
Google Analytics- That’s right all you Google haters, the big G is finally doing something that I actually like! The free analytics service they provide is simply great, it displays stats such as referral urls and it tells you what terms and variations of terms that were typed in to reach your website.
Here is a pic of the main google analytics screen, as you can see everything is well laid out in a professional manner. This is why in my book google has opened up a small part of my heart just for them. Its hard to be a google hater when they provide these stats for free!
Not only is the GA system very well organized it also offers everything you need with multiple ways to get to each section of your stats. For instances if you click the Traffic Sources button in the top left it will take you to page where you can then select search terms to see which terms were typed in to get you traffic (actual people typed these in).
Final Thoughts- So now that you have seen the GA system and heard me hype all about it its time for you to test it out and see what you think. One thing I will give to the sitemeter system over GA is that sitemeter shows stats from every search engine not just google. However since google is the biggest search engine right now you can pretty much predict that if you get good stats according to google you get good stats everywhere.
What do you think of the GA system? Do you use it or have you used it in the past? What changes would you like to see google make to the system for ultimate stat displays?
September 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
I use Google Analytics on almost all my sites … I do have some minor concerns about letting Google make connections between my sites, but that concern is outweighed by the terrific (and hands-off) job that Google does with my numbers.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I use Google Analytics on almost all my sites … Its give full info…
October 1st, 2008 at 5:55 am
I used to use GA But never found these features lol
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:36 am
You have a much more focused site. People who find you are probably looking for content on Manzanillo because they are going on vacation or something. That means you’ll get less traffic in the long run, but better quality, and better returns on affiliate ads and higher PPC.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Very Informative post. please keep it coming. I believe this is will definately help me to generate more traffic to my site,
In return, I found a site that has really valueble information on generating free traffic and there is a checklist as well,
check it out, its free, nothing to buy. http://www.dtalpha.com/talkback/?p=320
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:55 am
I definitely get most of the traffic on my sites form search engines and most specifically form Google.A few posts here and there that rank highly with the search engines will do wonders
May 11th, 2009 at 9:21 am
I have been using Google analytics for a while, very good , but still not fully utilizing it. It is agood tool, I never use sitemeter though..
May 12th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
yerps, thats right, its is quite handy. My friend claims that it will slow down my blog loading time. So far I never get the problem, will it really make my blog slow?
June 25th, 2009 at 6:35 am
I have used site meter as well as Google analytic.I found both of them really very awesome.Thanks for sharing features of these tools.
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