So, let’s say you have a website. That means you’re broadcasting information to the world, and presumably other people consume that information.
How do you know what people like about your content? How do you know what’s popular?
Some web hosting companies will provide a few pages of hit tracking. Setting up your own hit tracker and integrating it onto your site is typically a pain.
Enter Google Analytics. It’s a free service, tied into your Google account. When you create your Analytics account, the site displays a short snippet of HTML and Javascript code. All you have to do is paste that code into each webpage that you want to track.
Within a day or so, when you return to Google Analytics, it’ll show you a huge range of statistics and data about your site—which pages are popular, where your visitors are coming from, etc.
Stats are updated once per day, and there’s a wide range of ways to slice and dice the data. Very useful for getting a better idea of how your site’s used, so you can better help the people you help.