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Following my fashion of Google-related articles, I want to extend a bit on their product line and offer a few words of opinion (and possibly some facts) into website visitor statistics.

Analyzing your website’s visitors is one of the most useful things you can do when you’re worrying about things like SEO, advertisements, customer trends and various other topics.

There are many, many products and services out there related to grabbing and reporting data on your website’s visitors. Some of the most important features include: click-tracking, demographics, referrals and keywords. This is the census for your website. There are various other areas of reporting, but I’m going to focus on these four.

Because these services are all competing to track your website’s visitors, and because you are essentially providing them with very useful data about website-visitor trends, rates are quite competitive. Among the most cost-effective ways are a clear two contenders: hosting a website-statistics system on your own web server, and Google Analytics. Both have their pros and cons.

I’ll start with Google Analytics. This is a service provided free-of-charge by Google that allows you to view (or receive via email) daily reports on your visitors and their respective trends. You may want to know, for example, how many absolutely different people (in this case, IP addresses and cookies) have visited your website. Perhaps look at a map and pinpoint the top 5 countries. This data is all relational, in that you can click on a country, isolate information about users from that country, and compare it to data from another country’s visitors.

There is, however, one thing lacking from Analytics. You have absolutely no control about what you track, or how you track it. This is not a big deal for most websites who simply want to see pretty graphs representing page views or clicks. This is, however, important for intranets who wish to track on a lower level. You cannot specify user groups, target IP addresses and such. Analytics was clearly designed for mainstream Internet websites, not access-controlled corporate websites or resource sites.

Self hosted statistical reports will give you this advantage. Given that a majority of these systems are open-source, you can freely modify any section of the application to fit your needs. You can filter certain networks, view user-agents and generally do anything you want with it, short of conquering the world (unless you’re Facebook). Another benefit is integration with other systems, one being “heatmaps”.

ClickHeat - a popular heatmap script

Heatmaps are applications that, similarly to statistics systems, track users’ mouse clicks on your website. This is where the similarities end. The clicks are not reported as numbers, but as relative thermal overlays that display the areas that people click on your website. Heatmaps are extremely useful for optimizing website layout to accommodate hyperlinks, advertisements and other click-able objects. Heatmaps, however, should not be used alone. They do not track referrals, visitor addresses or anything else. The information they provide is limited to just a mouse click.

Using both a statistics reporting system in conjunction with a heatmap can prove invaluable to marketing professionals and website designers, regardless of the size of your website.