Site analytics, SEO and privacy

Keeping track of your site statistics is an important part of assessing the success of your online presence. You can see where your visitors are coming from and what they are looking at, which can help as you try to make your site as valuable as possible and measure the success of your SEO goals. Google Analytics is a common solution, but since some non-profits have privacy issues with integrating their sites with the Google Empire I'm also listing some other resources which allow you to retain your own stats on your own server.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free, easy, and will give you more data than you can shake a stick at. That's why it's so popular. On the other hand, you do rely on Google's servers which can cause performance issues and some organizations have privacy concerns with Google Analytics. To help against the potential performance hit, you can use a solution such as the Google Analytics module for Drupal, which will allow you to cache the required Javascript files locally, refreshing them from Google's servers periodically. Regarding the privacy issues, Google does give you the option to select "Do not share my Google Analytics data", although it is not selected by default. You can set this when you create a website profile in Google Analytics, or you can edit an existing profile to change the setting. (Another suggestion is to use jQuery to load the Google script only after the page sends a "ready" signal.)

More about Google Analytics.

Still have privacy concerns? Some other options

There are some other options for those organizations who still have privacy issues with Google's offering. See below for a few of them.

Piwik

Piwik's site states that the goal of Piwik is to "be an open source alternative to Google Analytics." It is built on plugins, so you can mix and match (and develop your own) plugins as needed. It is installed locally and stores the data in a MySQL database that you provide, so you don't have privacy concerns with your data residing on a server that is outside of your control. You can customize the interface and get your stats in real-time (or change the frequency for high-traffic sites).

Check out a demo and download Piwik here.

Mint

Mint is not free (a license is $30 per installation), but it is also self-hosted, so you can retain your data locally.

See more of Mint's features here.

Awstats

Awstats is an old workhorse and it browses through log files to determine traffic patterns. Since it pulls data from the log file directly instead of through a Javascript inserted into the page, it will include by default much more information, including search bots and folks with Javascript disabled (such as those who are browsing with Firefox and the NoScript plugin). The argument can be made that this is a more accurate account of your server traffic than Javascript-based trackers, but if your logs are large, it can result in server performance delays while you process the data, and the interface is not very customizable or up-to-date.

Download AwStats at SourceForge.

Search Engine Optimization and Analytics

You can be creative about how to use your statistics for SEO, but here are a few basics:

• Find out which keyword phrases people are finding your site with, and further optimize your site for popular and relevant combinations that you hadn't thought of before.
• Verify that those keyword phrases are landing on the pages that you intended, and if not, reoptimize the site to fix that.
• Find out which content has become popular and use this as you plan to develop future content.
• Find out which new sites have been referring visitors to your pages and determine if that relationship can be built upon. (For example, if you are getting a lot of hits from Facebook but haven't spent much time as an organization on your Facebook page or making it simple for folks to share your pages on Facebook, you may want to devote some time to that).
• If you have decided to use Google Analytics, you can also consider Google Webmaster Tools, which will give you additional information from Google's perspective which can be helpful towards SEO, such as top search queries, links to your site, keywords, errors, and so on.

Conclusion

It is a good idea to track your visits in some way so you can identify patterns, rate your SEO goals, and keep up with the way that your visitors are interacting with your site. One of the options above may be just what you need. If you have another suggestion, feel free to post it in the comments below.