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Ivan Petkov

Having a website without knowing what people are visiting it is like having a shop without seeing the customers who are shopping in it. There are many ways to get to know your audience and track the trends in its attitude towards your website. I will present just some of the tools with which you can get to know your audience.

Google Analytics

Like many Google services, Analytics is not their work. The company, which created the tool, is called Urchin on Demand and Google acquired it in 2005.

I would say that Google Analytics has become one of the compulsory systems measuring the visits and traffic of websites. Its numerous advantages are as follows: a very well designed international and free service, offering a lot of functionalities and tracking a variety of indicators. Due to the advantages, the service is equally good for every website, whether it is local, regional or international. Google Analytics offers a lot of functionalities which the majority of users can find complicated. Due to its popularity, however, various materials, tutorials, articles about it are available on the Internet, including support from Google, and forums where you can ask when encountering a problem.

Every new user needs to know that the use of Google Analytics (and of any other system measuring the visits) requires a special code on the website. So, you will need to contact the person who maintains your website.

In addition to the abovementioned indicators, Google Analytics is able to show you the keywords through which users of Google search engine have come to your website; the most popular pages on your website and how many people have visited them; the sources of traffic, i.e. how the users have come to your website – through an advertisement or a search engine, from a social network, from another website which has referred to yours, for example, etc.

Google Analytics works very well in symbiosis with Google advertising service AdWords. Its capacities to track user behaviour on your website, from entering it to leaving it, or to making a purchase, are impressive.

You can set your own filters to collect specific information.

Although Google Analytics is a professional tool, tracking the traffic of websites, I would recommend that you make an account and track the main indicators at least.

The training videos from Google Analytics channel on YouTube can help you. Here I will share a video with an overview of the service:

StatCounter

The service is an alternative to Google Analytics, but it has a free and a paid version. The free version includes basic statistics that are sufficient for every new user who wants to acquire a general idea of ​​the visits to his or her website. I will share, on the basis of my experience, that very often the statistics from Google Analytics are different from those from StatCounter. I however think that the data from Google Analytics are more reliable although they are much more detailed.

It is interesting to know that the company is based in Dublin and its founder Aodhan Culle was only 16 years old when he launched it.

As in Google Analytics, here you can obtain information on the main indicators explained at the beginning of the article as well as on some specific ones.

Unlike Google Analytics, StatCounter also provides general statistics covering all websites tracked by it. For example, on this page, you can see statistics about the most used browser or the most popular operating system. This information may be useful to analysts, specialists as well as to journalists from IT editions who often use it too.

Gemius

Gemius services are paid and are targeted to sites that need specialized and reliable information. I mentioned at the outset that the metric services cannot obtain information on the profile of the users who visit a particular website. Especially for advertisers, such information is of great importance, as it will enable them to target their messages to the most appropriate group of the Internet users. Companies such as Gemius play a significant role in this case, as they are able to collect this kind of information and make it available to both website owners and advertisers.

History

Using the experience gained in the USA and referring to the maxim that there is no gain without risk-taking, an American investor, Global eMarketing Corporation, established a Polish technology company in mid-June in 1999. The company had gradually realized that the dynamic and fast-growing Internet industry would need specialized tools for marketing and research, and the creator of Gemius had sought to materialize the ideas of the young professionals.

Gemius in Poland