Number 292 - September 2007
Google Analytics
by Les Benson, Big Blue and Cousins, Victoria, BC


   BB&C doesn't aspire to be the most popular website on the web. Nor do we try to make money out of our website content. That is indeed fortunate, because when we look at the statistics of our web site as provided by Google Analytics we would be somewhat disappointed--to put it mildly.

   But take it all with a grain of salt. Even Benjamin Disraeli mistrusted statistics many years ago in his often quoted--"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". Still, Google Analytics has compiled some interesting statistics on who uses our website and when and which pages are the most visited--with details of browser, screen resolution and more.

   So how did we get Google to analyse our web site at no charge? Rather simple. Get a free Google email account, sign up for Google Analytics, and add a script to allow Google to track our pages. So why don't you do it for your site? Well there is a problem, you have to add code, provided by Google, to each page to be tracked. Here is the code to be added just before the tag in the HTML code of each page.


   ("xxxxxxxx" is the code provided by Google--and linked to your Gmail account.) On each page! Rather tedious if there are a lot of pages as we have. But not if you put it in the "footer" of an "include file". (The results can be shared with any other user of Gmail accounts--and are available to our web team members).

   But enough of this detail. Here are just a few of our stats--all true statistics!

   During the period May 13 to June 12, 2007 the three top content urls (home url ignored) were our calendar page, followed by our locate a member page, and picture of the week. Our top three page titles were the Newsletter, Calendar of Activities, and Locate a BB&C Member.

   The images show just a small portion of the extensive statistics of our site that is available and updated constantly by Google.
  Number 292 - September 2007