Real SEO data analytics

The real SEO Data analytics

Early in internet history counters were used to measure the quantity of page views, the conters looked like:

Later the data was obtained by processing apache server logs, and getting statistics from using log file analyzers.

Sample statistics report obtained form log analyzer

Google Analytics
Now a day Webmasters can use Google’s analytics tool. This tool starts off with a JavaScript snipped called GATC (Google analytics Tracking Code). It's a small piece of code that using cookies and a unique code called Web Property ID collects various data from the website and sends it to Google analytics servers.
The initial script was called urchin.js and now Google updated the GATC to ga.js
The snippet code looks like this:

You can generate your own code from the Google analytics account, it’s free and all you need is a Gmail account, and access to your server.
You have to put that code at the bottom of the page just before your "body" tag closes, this code is safe for http and https servers, the GATC may slow down your page load a few miliseconds.
This is the basic part, later you can customize your script by using Analytics API, if you want to include variables for example.

What can you do with Google Analytics?
Google Analytics reports are a powerful way to track your visitor's data, anyway according to some bloggers, it's not 100% of the real data.  On the analytics dashboard you can track your visits, bounce rate, pageviews, location, traffic sources and others.

Google Analytics Dashboard

You can also create a custom report, correlating metrics (site usage, content, goals, e-commerce, and advertising) vs Dimensions (visitors, traffic sources, content, e-commerce, systems)

Custom Report Example

You can also track your adsense campaign with analytics; this analytics video explains the basics of adsense reports using analytics.

As you can see there are free powerful tools available for traching your visitor behavior, they are useful for most webmasters.

If you have comments or questions please put a comment.