About last year, I wrote a short opinion piece on my experience with Sitemeter and Google Analytics. At that time, I was testing out both services and was generally leaning more towards sitemeter for it’s simplicity and easy-to-understand statistics.
You will begin to see as you write more and more articles that you will begin to grow your organic traffic (traffic from the search engines), and it is really great to know where that traffic is coming from. It will help you write more articles that attract visitors to your site and will let you know what search engines or even what other third party sites are really attracted to your content. That’s why I must use some sort of service to track my article traffic and I highly recommend that you do the same.
So now that my business has grown and I have built quite a few more websites — I have found that sitemeter no longer works really well for me. The first reason is that in order to keep it free (which is always good!) you have to create a seperate account for each site you own. I’m not sure – but this may even be the case with their paid service although I think they were working on incorporating that feature. Secondly, in order to get a clearer picture of where your traffic is coming from you have to pay for their paid service — which I did for a while, but still could only see stats for one website.
Now because many of my sites are on the wordpress platform, it’s very easy for me to integrate the google analytics code (with a plugin). Adding the code in just the right place was always a pain in the bootie to me, but this plugin makes it so easy. More importantly, I can access stats and reports on ALL my sites from one location — and all for free.
Finally — now that I have given Google Analytics a longer look, I really like the service better. I know exactly where my traffic is coming from, what pages they are clicking on, keywords they are finding me with, how long they stay on the site, etc. It’s GREAT!
So having said all of that — I highly recommend Google Analytics for tracking the traffic to and from your articles. You get a lot for zero money. And isn’t that in the spirit of article marketing? 🙂