I would imagine a lot of people these days use Google Analytics. I do.
Thanks David. Is Google Analytics free, or subscription? Also, I do not write code. Expressions web site design and layout is all done without coding.
Thanks
Dave
I used Expression web for years at work. It is both a visual editor and a code editor.
Funny thing is when I checked my own website yesterday, I realised that it has been such a long time since I did proper site maintenance that I had forgotten how it works. Including how I installed analytics. My site is a self hosted Wordpress site using a theme I wrote myself, I'm guessing your site a basic flat HTML site rather than database powered so it should be straight forward (if tedious) to amend on a page by page basis.
Looking at the source code for my site, I can see from the code listing that there is a snippet of javascript in the header that provides the analytics, but I can't see how it got there. It doesn't seem to be hard coded into the header, nor is there any obvious plugin or widget that inserts it. I need to look more carefully and figure it out.
Getting back to your situation, Analytics is free but you do need to set up an analytics account with Google. This will give you an account id number you use to add your site to the Analytics system and access to the analytics backend where you can see all sorts of different reports, including live tracking of current visitors to your site.
To make this work, they provide you with a little piece of code that you have to add to the <head> section of your site and customise with the ID number of your account.
The tag code looks like this:
The TAG_ID is replaced with the ID of your account and the code snippet has to be placed just after the <head> tag on each page you want tracked.
Typically with a database powered website there will be a common <head> section that is automatically inserted into to each page, but because you hand built your site it depends on how you put it together. You might need to manually add the snippet to each page.
But your first step is to sign up for a free analytics account, get the account ID code and the analytics tag code. Judging by the confusing documentation google provide which is really aimed at the kind of specialist analytics people you find in corporate marketing departments rather than for private site webmasters, you might well be better off finding a Youtube tutorial that walks you through the entire process step by step.
p.s.
I'm not sure what kind of metrics you used previously, but I'm going to guess it was a typical server side package often provided by web hosts such as AWstats or Webalizer.
If you opt for Google Analytics, you should find it more accurate (and likely to show less traffic than other packages) because it works by counting the number of times the analytics tag is called, rather than by simply counting http requests like the traditional server metrics.
These simpler metrics tend not to filter out bots and search crawlers and they double count things like images, css code files and other support files that are needed to create a single page. This accumulation of hits can lead to a grossly inflated hit count for your site. Google analytics is a lot more conservative and accurate.
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