So, you've just spent some time and money producing a new website for your nonprofit organization. Do you ever wonder things like:
- Who's visiting the site?
- How many people visit the site on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?
- What are the most popular pages of the site?
- How are people finding our site online?
These are just a few of the questions that a good web analytics program can answer. And you don't have to blow the budget just to have one put in place.
In the past, most analytics programs were installed on the web server that hosted the web site. But now, there are easier, less-invasive ways of getting the information you want about your site's traffic.
A few examples of these new services are Google Analytics (free) and Visistat (free trial / $19.95 per month). So, instead of installing a bulky program on a server, these web-based services only require that you add a tiny snippet of text to each of your web pages -- something that would take about 20 minutes for a 10-20 page website.
My personal preference is Visistat, but you can't beat Google's pricing. The good news is that it's free either way to get started, and you can make the best decision based on your own needs.
One word of caution: Once you have access to this data, it can be a little addictive!
