Going Beyond Hits

While wanting to add a hit counter to my blog the other day, I discovered something - you can go beyond hits, you can actually track full Analytics VERY easily on your blog.

This will tell you more than how many visits or hits you get on your blog. It will tell you page by page. So if your blog isn't heavily commented on, you'll at least know what pages people are browsing more frequently. So you just might find out that a project that you loved, a lot of other people did too and it might spur you to do it again.

Truth be told, professionally, I'm in marketing communications, so this stuff really fasinates me... and I realize I just may be the only one. But you know, now that I've got google analytics installed on my blog, I'll be able to find that out. 


Here is how you do it. 


Visit https://www.google.com/analytics/

Actually - you can get the full instructions here.  


Basically, you're going to create an account with Google Analytics, it gives you a snippet of code that you will paste into the body section of your template (which is really very easy, just go to the "edit HTML" link under the "layout" tab and scroll through 'till you see "body" inside of tags and just after that, past the code they give you.)


It was so easy - I did it yesterday and I don't even completely remember how to do it... 


But I'm thrilled I did it yesterday because as it turns out, it was right after I installed the code, that Ana linked to my blog so I was able to see that I got over 600 visits, 1,883 page views and people visited on average 2.81 pages. The most popular page was my bookcase page, next was home page of the blog, next the full before and after and following, my smile clipart rail.


I don't know how things went today, the reports update daily.