I am going to be talking about something that is very near and dear to my heart. I didn’t think I would be revealing this to my blog audience so soon. I try to closely guard it because I’m not 100% proud of it. It is something that isn’t fully under my control, so bare with me while you read this… and please don’t poke fun.
Google Analytics
Recently I've started getting more and more comment spam. At first it started out with one every few days, now it's about two or three a day. I actually like this - for now. It's good to see some traffic to the website, even though it may not be good traffic. It's a small indicator that the site has some exposure somewhere.
After a while this will probably get irritating, but for now, I'm happy to see it... along with real comments of course.
Anybody that creates a webpage and publishes, wants to know if someone is viewing it, what they are doing on it, and if a search engine is indexing it. I wanted to start doing exactly that. Go Daddy provides some stats about how many hits, from where, what browser, and a few other bits of information. Not enough to satisfy me, especially when I want more in-depth insight regarding my visitors. Another major reason I wanted to do this is because the stats that I get form Go Daddy, include the hits that are being generated by my editing/viewing of the pages. This can add upto 100s a day, skewing my stats and perseption of how good the site is doing.
For this, I turn to who other than Google - or Google Analytics to be more precise. They have a whole slew of different metrics that are measured for a given site. Extremely easy to setup - for a regular website... and just a bit more work is needed to get it working with Drupal.