Studio Rockstar

Any webmaster knows that one of the hardest metrics to pin down for a website are the number of visitors to your site. You might run Webalizer on your access logs and it’ll tell you that you have 100,000 unique visitors a month — and then you try out something like Google Analytics and it’ll tell you that you only have 5,000 visitors a month. It’s a confusing art to pinpoint metrics for your site, and no one statistics packages has what it takes. I’ve found through experimentation of dozens of stats packages that the combination of Mint and Google Analytics gives me almost all the tools I need to track my websites.

Mint for the quick update

Sometimes it’s nice to know what’s happening right now on your website. Mint does this perfectly. You can figure out where people are coming from — is it a blog post? Did you just jump to page #1 for a Google search? Mint will tell you. One of the most valuable peppers for this kind of tracking is Ronald Heft’s Trends.

Bottom line is: no other stats package out there gives you a better in-depth view of what’s going on with your site right now. Plus Mint is just so damn sexy — I always love looking at it. Not to mention the total bonus points for the iPhone compatible layout for Mint (for the statsaholic on the go!).

Google Analytics for the long-term

However, there are times when you want to see traffic trends for the year or even longer. Absolutely nothing beats out Google Analytics in this area. First off, it keeps all of your statistics since you started using GA. So if you want to go back three months in time, you can. Mint doesn’t allow you this option. Secondly, Google keeps incredibly detailed logs about search engine keywords, referring domains, and browser configurations. You can view everything in multiple formats (i.e. table, graph, pie chart) and it’s usually really easy to understand.

However, the most powerful feature of GA is the ability to compare two different time periods. Say you wanted to compare this week’s traffic with last month’s traffic in the same week. Just pull down the timeline picker, and click the checkbox “Compare to Past.” This is where things start to get interesting:

Now if you take the time to dive into the more complicated screens, you can get all kinds of really valuable information. My favorite is applying this to the search terms screen. Go to Traffic Sources -> Search Engines, change the segment to Keywords, and then make sure you’re comparing to the past. What you get is the change in performance for each keyword from this month to last month. This is HUGE!!

You can see immediately that whatever SEO work I did for “make money off your poetry” clearly worked. Using this compare to past tool gives you some of the most important information you can get from any analytics package on the market.

Conclusion

By using a combination of Google Analytics and Mint, you can make sure that you know when a digg is coming, and at the same time keep tabs on how effective your SEO is doing. It’s an invaluable pair of applications, and probably two of my most used applications — I’d say I use both of them on a daily basis.

Don’t get fooled and think that there’s only one stats package that can serve all your needs — there’s no reason you can’t use two of them at once!