Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 13

Paying Attention to the Numbers

In This Chapter

• Picking the right analytics program
• Studying your community members' habits
• Analyzing traffic

Statistics and analytics programs can tell you everything you need to know about how your community members spend their time online. You can find out how many visits a given website gets each day, where those visitors come from, what browsers they're using, what they're doing when they land on your website, how long they're staying, and much more. As you can imagine, all this stuff is important for you to note and analyze.

Without a good stats program and a regular analysis of your community's habits, you won't be able to succeed as a community manager or move your community forward. Your stats give you an important peek at your community members' habits.

Choosing an Analytics Program

Many analytics programs are available, some of which are free. With the exception of Google Analytics, which is probably the most comprehensive free stats tool available, many of the free services are bare-bones products that require you to pay for an upgrade. When you're searching for a stats package, do your research. These programs aren't created equal, and you want to find the one that best suits your brand and your community's needs. Some of my recommendations are

• Google Analytics
• Site Meter
• Performancing Metrics
• Omniture
• StatCounter
• Webtrends

Take some time to check your stats and analytics tools each day, but save time once a week to look ...