I love Google Analytics

In fact I may love it too much. I often spend far too much of my day sitting in front of the screen checking to see if and how our visitation numbers have changed. It’s really quite a waste of time. That being said I feel like anyone running a website should have Google Analytics or some kind of tracking software installed.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service that allows a webmaster to see who is viewing their website, where they came from and what they are viewing. It also allows you to track things like how people navigate through your site and allows you to define goals and see what factors are contributing to people who satisfy those goals.

Why You Should Install It Now

I recommend putting Google Analytics on your site as soon as possible. I actually intended to write this blog right when I started the site, but…I didn’t. You’re probably thinking that since you will be pretty much the only one going there for a while, there’s no rush. There’s a possibility however that people will just “drop by.” All of our sites have been spidered without us submitting them to Google and before we had an inbound link. When people “wander in” by certain search terms you get a feel for what you should be focusing your content on.

Installing Google Analytics also helps you quickly come to the realization that you need some kind of Content Management System (CMS), even if it’s a DIY one. In the course of developing your site you will have all kinds of site-wide changes like adding analytics that you will need to do, and some kind of content management is a must to make that simple. Even if it’s just using Smarty templates, you need to make these kind of changes easy.

Quick Tips

A couple of quick tips that would have saved me some time:

Use a Cookie to Exclude Yourself

You want to exclude yourself and anyone who works on your site from inflating your stats. You can do this with a filter as described here. Most people tend to exclude themselves by IP address. I may be unique, but I travel a lot and use my laptop from many different locations. I also have semi-frequent changes in IP due to my ISP, so IP seems like a fairly inexact way to exclude myself. If I set a cookie on my browser, then I know that I will be excluded regardless of where I log in from.

Important: You need to do this on every browser on your machine as it is set via cookie. If you rune IE and Firefox both for example, both need to have the cookie set.

The “Referrer” To Your Site Sticks

I found the documentation on this subject to be unclear but finally found confirmation here. If someone comes to you from a certain link or search and then returns to your site directly in the future, it will still show as being “referred” from the original site. This makes sense as it helps you calculate how “useful” that source was.

Read the Google Analytics Blog

The Google Analytics Blog oftentimes has great insight and information. I recommend reading the archived content as soon as possible and then keeping up with new posts.

We often want to just “get started” on our ideas before we’ve found a suitable name for them. In these cases we usually use a service like DYNDNS’s dynamic website service. Basically they have registered a bunch of TLDs (Top Level Domains) and will allow you to create a specific name under those domains for free. So for example, DYNDNS has dynalias.com, which we usually use. So until we come up with a name for our site, we can register prototype.dynalias.com or some such and be able to work on the site. While the service is free, DYNDNS is aggressive about clearing out the names pretty quickly unless you ‘touch’ them by updating.

In the process of trying to find a domain name you may have already interacted with a domain registrar, a service like GoDaddy or Register.com, which provides the service of registering your domain name for you (and usually much more). (If nothing else, you’ve used their web interface to check if your desired domain name was available [it probably wasn't].) So once you’ve found your desired domain name, you now have to choose which domain registrar you want to use.

Historically we have only done low-volume domain registrations. Just one or two here or there, so we haven’t worried horribly about price. However in this experiment, particularly in the early stages, those yearly fees can have a considerable impact on our profitability. Consequently we turned our attention to the lower cost alternatives, and our first question is, of course: Why are some cheaper than others?

The general consensus is that there is no particular reason why Register.com costs dramatically more than GoDaddy. At their base they are providing the same service, which, for a .com domain, costs them roughly $7. So GoDaddy at approximately $10 is not making a huge markup on this service, while Register.com makes quite a profit. In both cases, however, their main goal is to upsell other services (like hosting) for which they have a higher profit margin.

In our experiment one of our goals is to avoid unnecessary charges. We have used several of the registrars and our results have been largely as expected. We have historically used Register.com and have always been satisfied with their results, however for this project we needed a lower priced alternative. So we tried both GoDaddy and NameCheap for our domains.

You can read our preliminary reviews of the services, however neither had any particularly surprising deficits. Once we had registered the domains we needed to set up the DNS entries for them, which we have documented as well. At that point we tested them out and were the proud owners of several new domains: empty lots waiting for us to start developing.

Starting from square one, we hope you’ll join us as we research, test, and review information and opportunities in the “online entrepreneur” market from a realistic perspective. We’re looking for what really works and what’s a flash in the pan, and we look forward to sharing and getting feedback all along the way.

Send a comment and let us know of your efforts, successes, and even failures in the internet business space, and let us know what would be helpful in your online entrepreneur journey. We invite you to be a part of our “perpetual beta test.”