The answer may be Google Analytics, now that it no longer has a waiting list and does not require you have a Google AdSense account. And it’s all free, of course.

The question is a practical one for legal services and other non-profits living with IT-staff deficits, and as likely as not don’t have the resources or in-house talent to mount their own, nominally sophisticated set up for tracking website statistics. Yes, your web hosting service undoubtedly provides some kind of web “traffic” reports as part of the package, but does it give you everything you need or could use? Reliably? (Executive Director, who needs stats stat for a funding proposal, like yesterday: “What? I can only get a report on the top 100 page views? There’s no data more than a year old? We don’t have direct access to the web logs? Didn’t we pay for more than this? We didn’t? And they don’t offer any more than this, even if we did?”) Or you may have someone like Scott “Voodoo” Trudeau who in between his morning espressos could set you up stats righteous with some open source goodie like AWStats or such, but few programs are so blessed.

As much as anyone else, this dilemma has plagued LSNC for years. Over the years we all too long engaged in the false economy of relying on a “free” web server, courtesy of our network provider (whom we love, otherwise), and whatever web statistical reporting service du jour they deigned to offer. And too often considerable head scratching on their part when the reporting functions broke down, for whatever reason. Ugh. To resolve this chronic problem, we not only worked out an arrangement with our network provider to hook up a web server we built and configured to our liking, but we also have been exploring other options for getting accurate website data reports. We may settle on using the feature set in Google Analytics as the core of our web reporting.

I say “may” because we haven’t used it long enough to get several months of web data under our belts to fully evaluate how good it actually is, consistently and reliably. But the initial experiences are very promising. By design, Google Analytics is oriented toward a “marketing” model, so it emphasizes reporting features that are extraneous to the purposes of a legal services organization that needs to report to LSC and other typical funding sources about how website resources are being used. But Google Analytics also has usage reporting features, many of which are common to other web stat services, that are as useful to a non-profit as it would be to a commercial enterprise: unique visitors, page views, depth of visitor sessions, rankings of entrance and exit points, length of visits, and so on. It also offers analytic tools for evaluating site navigation patterns and the “clickability” of links on any particular page. There is a fair amount of data analysis available to measurably add to your understanding how “usable” your website actually is. Most any view or ranking you would look for would encompass up to 500 distinct pages. There are select report filtering features. You can track multiple domains within one account. And it’s a total freebie, provided you stay under the annual 5 million page-view limit. (Oh, please, you wish!) Very good stuff.

Google Analytics is very easy to implement, but does involve some work, as easy as it may be. Once you set up an account, you need to add a code snippet to every page you want tracked. (To see an example, view the source on this page and look at the very bottom, before the closing body tag.) For a site like LSNC.net or Webdogs 2.0, all this required was adding the code snippet to the WordPress footer.php file, or the handful of other, static HTML files at the site. There is even a solution for the MediaWiki components at our main website like our CalWORKs pages, which involves adding the code snippet to the MonoBook.php file. Tracking PDF and other file downloads involves more work, since you have to tag individual download links with a special code.

For those who like to have on-topic tech books, there is one title that came out a few weeks back, aptly entitled Google Analytics. One of the unexpected surprises in this book, and for me helpful, are the initial chapters that are not about Google Analytics at all, but rather about AWStats as an object lesson of what is valid and not valid about traditional web log analyzers.

There are significant things Google Analytics cannot do for you, most notably the inability to analyze your existing web logs, if you need that to be done. If you go with Google Analytics, its a totally forward approach. In any event, after we get more experience with it, I will try to breakdown better how this works for us, and whether it is keeper.

Oh, and by the way, Mister Voodoo himself has some nice things to say about Google Analytics.