DAY 11: Setting Up Your Analytics

“Definition of Statistics:
The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.”

- Evan Esar -

Get ready to track your SEO performance

Now that your website is up and running, we want to make sure that we can monitor what’s going on, and whether or not our hard work is paying off.

The best way to do that is by setting up a couple of Analytics and Stats monitoring systems that will enable us to follow up with our progress.

Site Monitoring Systems

This type of monitoring system will analyze how your site fares within the specific search engine.

Important data such as the crawling information, indexing of the pages, linking status, and other webmaster’s related information of your site will be provided.

The service is provided free from each of the major search engine, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.

1.   Go to Google Webmaster Tools.

2.   If you already have a Google account, just enter your account information and hit the button “Sign in”.

If you don’t have a Google account, click “Create an Account Now!” and follow the wizard.

3.   Once you login to your account, add a new website.

4.   If all is normal, you should see a confirmation page like this one:

5.    Just below the confirmation message, you’ll see a request to “Verify your site”, click on the link now.

6.    On the page, you can now see that your status is “NOT VERIFIED”, so in the drop down box “Choose verification method…”, select “Upload an HTML file”.

7.    More instructions will then being displayed for you. Just follow the instructions and once you are done, click on the button “Verify”.

8.    If everything went well, you should see the following confirmation message.

Congratulations, you have finish to setup your Google Webmaster Tool system.

Make sure to come back later on, and explore more of the tools and reports made available to you, also, you’ll be able to add a sitemap here too.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

1.     Go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and login to your yahoo account or create one if you don’t have one yet.

2.     Under the menu “My Sites”, enter the URL of your new website, and click “Add My Site”.

3.     Your new domain should now be listed under “Site”, click on the button “Explore”.

4.     On the left menu, click on “Authentication”.

5.     Choose the first option “By uploading a verification file to my site.”

6.     Follow the instructions, and when you are ready, click the button “Ready to Authenticate”.

7.     If everything went well (as it is supposed to), you should see the following confirmation message on screen.

Congratulations, you have finish setting up your domain with Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Just like for Google Webmaster Tools, make sure to come back later to spend some time to browse around the different tools that are offered to you, as well as submitting your sitemap.

Bing Webmaster Center

1.     Go to Bing Webmaster Center

2.     Click on “Sign In” to start.

3.     On your Dashboard, click “Add a site”

4.      Fill in the information as required, if you already have a sitemap, you can enter the URL now, if not, you can do that later. Once you are finished, click on “Submit”.

5.     On the new screen, go for XML file authentication, download the file and upload it on your server as instructed. Once this is done, click on “Return to Site List”

6.     If all went fine, you should now see your site listed there.

Congratulations, you are done setting up your domain with Bing Webmaster Center, feel free to browse through the different tools and reports that are made available to you.

For more information, I invite you to read one of my recent posts regarding Bing Webmaster Center.

Stats Monitoring Systems

The webmaster tools are great for general monitoring of your site, but if you really want to analyze in detail your traffic stats, you’ll have to go with more targeted tools.

Webalizer / Awstats

2 of the most popular traffic stats reports are from Webalizer (more numerical report oriented) and Awstats (more graphical oriented).

Not only the range of details provided is incredibly detailed, they both are free to setup and use. In fact, they are usually already setup for you by your hosting company on your account for free.

Among all my analytical tools, this is probably where I spend the most of my time on.

Google Analytics

This is another analytical tool provided by Google. The stats provided by Google Analytics are less detailed, but since they come from Google, people like to rely on them.

It’s a matter of personal choice here again.

Google Analytics can easily be setup on your site, either manually; either using the plugin Google Analyticator for WordPress (you are using WordPress, right?).

Alexa

Alexa is probably the most popular traffic volume scoring tool out there and used by many people as reference when it comes to evaluate the popularity of a site.

With Alexa, the lower your score, the better it is. The score indicated your traffic volume position in comparison with all the others website on internet.

As you can see on the snapshot for example, out of all the websites on internet, yesterday 31,651 had more traffic volume than my site, which place NicolasPrudhon.com in the top 0.11% on internet.

Quantcast

Quantcast is not so interesting as per the traffic stats it monitors, but is rather a monitoring tool focused on demographics. It will provide you all sorts of information such as the gender, age range, income, etc… of your visitors.

Depending of the industry you are working in, this kind of information can be invaluable for you and your business!

Setting up Quantcast on your site very easy and can be done using the Quantcast Quantifier plugin for WordPress.

Exercise

Before you start any promotion work with and for your site, take the time to setup all your analytical accounts as you’ll then be able to monitor in detail how much you have improved.

Also remember that the key to successful optimization is testing, and unless you have some data to backup your actions, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for you to define whether a change you made really had an impact (positive or negative) on your site.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.