In Part 1 of our three-part series, we covered Shaun Inman’s excellent website statistics software Mint, a commercial software package you can install on your own server to record great-looking information about your readers. If you haven’t already, go take a look at that review.

Here in Part 2, we’ll take a look at Google’s free Analytics service, the company’s offering to website owners for viewing and analyzing visitor information. As with Mint, the service can be used with any website, but is simple and easy enough to use for anyone to try. 

Like Mint, Google Analytics presents you with a main “Dashboard” for an overview of your site’s traffic. Unlike Mint, however, this Dashboard is more a summary and portal to more specialized information pages. By default, the Dashboard will show you a graph of the past month’s traffic, the scope of which is customizable (so I could see a graph of the past week instead, if I wanted to), at the top of the page. Further down, you’ll find Site Usage statistics, with numbers such as “Visits,” “Bounce Rate,” and “Average Time on Site.”

(For those not familiar with the terminology of website statistics, worry not. We’ll be publishing a sort of dictionary of the terms to help you become familiar with them in the next week.)

The first of the final four panels on the Dashboard is the Visitor Overview, essentially a reprint of the first graph on the page with a count of the total visitors.

There’s also the Map Overlay, which I think is probably the most interesting thing on the page. It shows a map of the world, with each country colored a shade of green depending on how much of your traffic comes from that country. I can see at a glance, for example, that Blogging Addiction gets most of its traffic from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and then Germany.

Third, there’s the Traffic Sources Overview, which is basically just a fancy way to say “How Your Visitors Get To Your Site.” This shows a basic pie chart with three categories: Referring Sites (someone clicked a link on another site to get to yours), Direct Traffic (someone typed your website URL into their browser), and Search Engines (someone did a search and found your website in the results). With a quick look, I can see that Blogging Addiction gets over three quarters of its traffic from Referring Sites, and nearly a fifth from Direct Traffic.

Finally, we have the Content Overview, which shows your top five most popular pages as sorted by Pageviews. Our most popular page is our homepage, with just over 30% of our pageviews, followed by Part 1 of this series, with nearly the same amount.

As mentioned before, each of these parts is more of a summary than a definitive set of statistics, so clicking any of them will lead you to a more detailed page with that information. And this is barely scratching the surface; Google Analytics has many more features hid away in the menus. Don’t worry, we’ll be covering these in future posts as well.

As a preview, some of the additional information you can find relates to your visitor’s technical information like their web browser (I’m proud to announce that over 80% of our visitors use Firefox), operating system, or screen size. You can find out about visitor loyalty, which is basically how often your visitors return to your site.

Google Analytics isn’t limited just to providing information; you can set up “Goals” to help you improve the traffic of your site. And of course, any of the information can be viewed according to a specified time period, in case you want a report just on the last 17 days.

Overall, Google Analytics is a fantastic offering. And being a Google product, it’s free as well, so there’s no reason not to give it a try. If you’re still looking for more information, check out Google’s official Feature Overview page.

In our third and final web statistics review, we’ll take a look at Statcounter, another free offering that’s been around for quite a while. Expect to see that post early next week.