Today’s Guardian has an interesting article on blogs and blogging. Apparently, the blogging craze has peaked, and there are now over 200 million ‘abandoned’ blogs out there.

So it seems that the initial euphoria that ‘anyone can be a journalist’ has given way to the realisation that not everybody has an opinion, and some people would prefer to consume content than produce it. If you’re not passionate in your online ramblings, your enthusiasm will wane.

I find it hard keeping this blog up to date, but that’s a case of being busy than anything else. That and the fact that we get between 10-30 comments on our blog every day, and pretty much all of them are spam.

Grrrr!!!

Google Analytics, one of the latest tools from Google, is a very effective way to find out how many people are coming to your website. It’s got several features that put it head and shoulders above the rest of the website visitor analysis packages:

1. Easy to set up and manage
2. Integrates well with Google AdWords
3. You can find out your conversion rates from different sources
4. It’s very easy to see where visitors are coming from geographically
5. Key data for marketers, webmasters and content publishers is easily accessible
6. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s free!

Setting up Analytics couldn’t be simpler. You register for a free account; Google gives you a piece of code to put on your pages, and you’re up and running.

When Analytics starts tracking your site, you’ll be able to access an interface that looks like this:

The first graph (top-left) gives a trend analysis of how many visitors are coming to your website, and how many pages they are viewing. By clicking on the calendar on the left-hand side of the page, you can check visitors by day, week, month and year. It’s very easy to see what days, weeks and months are busiest on your website with this information.

The top-right graph shows what percentage of visitors has been to the site before. This is interesting information, and gives you a good insight into visitor loyalty and frequency.

The map on the bottom-left shows where your visitors come from geographically. In the case of this website, Ireland and the UK provide most of the visitors, though you can see visitors coming from all over the Continent and the US. Note that Google can tell the county (and even the neighbourhood) that a visitor comes from, down to pinpointing a visitor to the Rathmines neighbourhood.

The bottom-right graph shows the source of the visitor. Did they come directly to the site, or did they visit from Google, Yahoo or MSN? Maybe they were referred by your email marketing campaign, or by a banner ad? Or maybe they clicked a link to visit your website. This graph is excellent for telling you how your search engine marketing is performing.

I’ll go into the simplicity and excellence of Google Analytics in further posts, but for the moment, let me just say that I highly recommend it. Of course, if you’d like to have Google Analytics on your website, we can help to implement it for you.